


Legacy

by MajorMinor



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Mutants, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Canon-Typical Violence, Deaf Clint Barton, F/F, F/M, Gen, Original Character Death(s), Past Character Death, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Civil War (Marvel), Pre-HYDRA Reveal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2019-07-07 10:12:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 48,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15906186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajorMinor/pseuds/MajorMinor
Summary: Marlena didn’t ask for her life to go to shit. She didn’t want to see her mom’s dead body, or to find out she comes from a line of Shield agents, or be sent off to live with two of the world’s most dangerous and respected spies. But here she was with a new set of problems to tackle, that all lead to a discovery that she never, not even after an alien attack on her hometown, would have seen coming.





	1. Welcome To The Family

**Author's Note:**

> this is a re-write of the VERY FIRST fic i ever wrote way back in 2012. i actually have an idea of how it's gonna end, and have a good 20 something pages written up so far, so it's gonna get finished. but for now, enjoy this self-indulgent fic i've been sitting on for 6 years.

The white fluorescent lights were blinding as Marlena struggled to lift her eyelids. She blinked a few times before her eyes finally adjusted to the light around her. She was met with a stark steel gray ceiling. Lifting her head slowly, she turned to get a better look at where she was. The room was made up like a small hospital room, the walls were all the same steely gray as the ceiling. There was an iv in her arm, and ecg wires attached to her chest.

Slowly, she sat up in the cot she was lying in, which was difficult given how stiff she was. She had changed out of the shorts and t-shirt that she’d put on earlier that day and into a standard hospital gown. Or rather, she’d been changed out of them. In the corner of the room, she saw her clothes folded neatly on a chair. From where she sat, she could just make out a dark stain on her shirt. The rusty brown color was unmistakably blood.

“What the hell.” she whispered.  

She turned her head and saw that the door had a window. She tugged at the wires until they detached from her skin, muffling her groans of pain. The heart monitor next to her bed flatlined, but she ignored it. She struggled against her sore midsection, and shuffled to the door. A few stiff steps later, and she reached the door. She reached down for the handle, but it was locked and wouldn’t budge no matter how hard she yanked it.

She pressed her face against the glass, trying to peer around the confines of her small field of vision. There was nothing more than an indiscreet gray wall that extended down into what couldn’t have been anything more than a hallway. She knocked on the glass and tried the handle again.

“Hello?” she called out.

Nothing.

Her worry growing, she moved back a few steps. Her legs were sore, and her abdomen was so stiff she was trying to rack her brain for a synonym to properly describe the pain. Taking in a few deep breaths, she squared her shoulders, and moved forward as quickly as she could manage, ramming her side against the door. Still nothing.

“Ow.” she groaned.

Her effort hadn’t been all for nothing. A moment later, someone walked past the door.

“Hey!” she pounded on the glass. “Hey! Where the hell am I?”

The person paused, clearly taken by surprise at her presence. They were dressed in what looked like a military issued uniform, but instead of camo, it was a grayish black, with an emblem printed into the shoulder. It looked like a blocky design of an eagle. FBI? CIA? Marlena never paid enough attention in her American government class to know off the top of her head.

They stared at her for a moment longer, before taking out a radio, saying something inaudible, and taking off back in the direction from which they’d come.   

“ _Fuck.”_ she hissed.

Marlena stepped back from the door, pacing across the room. Where the hell was she? What trouble had she gotten herself into now that the military had to step in? Cursing out her pre calc teacher wasn’t _that_ much of a crime, was it?

But her answer came sooner than she had thought. Not even a whole minute later, the door opened. She rushed to pull the gown shut across her backside, and pressed herself against the wall where the chair was holding her clothes.

A woman had come in, tall, dark haired, brown skin, and with a very commanding presence. She wore the same uniform as the person in the hall. Marlena stared at her for a moment, unsure of what to start off with. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ was too aggressive, but ‘Where the fuck am I?’ sounded too desperate.

“My name is Maria Hill.” the woman started. “I know you must be confused and scared,”

 _Must be is an understatement._ Marlena thought.

“But you'll have the answers you need soon enough. But right now, you need to get checked out by our medical team.” Maria continued.

“Then what'll happen to me?” Marlena asked sheepishly.

“Then you'll learn why you're here. You'll be out of here within the hour, I promise.” Agent Hill answered.

Marlena didn’t say anything. This Maria Hill spoke like an agent from a sci-fi movie. She half expected her next sentence to be “We’ve waited a long time for you, Chosen One.”

Maria cocked her head in the direction of the chair. “Your clothes are, a bit worse for wear, but I’d imagine that staying in a hospital gown is less than stellar.”

No reply.

“Get dressed, I’ll wait outside, and when you’re ready, we can get going.”

Hill turned and walked back out the way she’d come, and the room returned to its eerie silence and feeling of isolation. Marlena heaved out a sigh, quickly grabbed her clothes, and shuffled out of the view of the window.

Underneath the gown, there was a tightly wrapped ace bandage around her stomach. That explained why she felt so stiff. She ran her fingers across it, trying to feel for the wound that required such a treatment, but could only feel the tightly woven fabric bundled up underneath.

“What the hell happened to you?” she whispered.

She got dressed slowly, her eyes never lifting from the bandages, afraid that moving too fast would cause them to unravel, and whatever laid underneath would cause her to unfold along with it. When she was done, she went to the door, which was still locked. She knocked, and Hill appeared in the window and opened it for her.

“You ready?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Marlena huffed.

Hill nodded and lead the way to the left end of the corridor. As they walked, they passed no one else, but Marlena could hear the soft but sure humming of some far off mechanical workings. She pressed her hand against the wall as they walked, she could feel it vibrating slightly. Rickety electrical work? Ancient central air unit?

“What kind of building is this?” Marlena asked after a while.

Hill chuckled a bit. “A very interesting one, to say the least.”

That could have applied to anything from a laboratory, to a government sanctioned torture chamber. Marlena tried to keep her mind focused on the former.

Finally, they stopped. Hill held out her hand in front of Marlena, signaling for her to wait. They stood to the side of an open doorway, but Marlena couldn’t see inside.

“Wait here.” Hill instructed. She stepped inside, leaving Marlena along again.

She had half a mind to charge off down the hall, but what good would that do her with no idea of where she was and some intense injury limiting her movements? Instead she took a step forward, trying to peer around the corner, and got a good glimpse of what was inside.

What she saw relieved her worries about government torture, but only added more questions to her already growing list. The room wasn't large, but there were windows that opened up to nothing but clouds and blue sky for miles. It was situated on a balcony, but what exactly that overlooked, Marlena couldn’t see. The windows gave off the illusion of being an open air deck to the heavens. There was a table in the middle, where Hill had her back turned to the doorway, talking quietly with a tall black man, who caught sight of her, with his one good eye,the moment she stuck her head inside.

“I see you’re up and about.” he said. His comment was innocent enough, but the deepness and authority of his voice made Marlena jump.

She stepped further into the doorway, her eyes jumping from the man, to Hill, to whatever possible exits she could see.

The man nodded his head to Hill, and she turned and started back to the doorway. On her way out, she gave Marlena a small squeeze on her shoulder, and then she was gone, leaving Marlena and the stranger alone.

The man walked from around the desk and gestured to a chair placed in front of it. “It's rude to stand in doorways you know.” he said.

“Right, um, sorry.” Marlena fumbled, snapping out of her stupor. She into the room, shuffling again to the chair. Instead of sitting, she simply leaned against it, not wanting to make herself too comfortable, or vulnerable.

“All of this must be very confusing.” he started, “But I’ll try to keep this as simple as possible until you’re ready to handle the full magnitude of what you’ve been through.”

Marlena didn't reply. She sat motionless and waited for him to continue.

When he caught drift of the fact that she had nothing to say, he continued. “I'm Nick Fury, Director of Shield.”

“Shield?” Marlena asked, finally breaking her silence. She knew that name. She racked her brain, kicking herself for not paying better attention in American government. They were government alright, about as tightly secured as a bear trap, wrapped in barbed wire, set on fire, inside a Smithsonian vault.

“You-you’re the ones who did those experiments back during World War 2.” She said, her brain finally unlodging the information.

“That would be us.”

Maybe the torture wasn’t out of the question.

“What does that have to do with me?”

Fury walked back to the other side of the table. There was a folder there that she hadn’t noticed before. He pushed it across the table to her. Not waiting for her to open it, he continued on.

“Three days ago, several New York boroughs were attacked by an army from space.”

Marlena raised an eyebrow at Fury.

“I know it sounds crazy, but imagine being at the center of all that craziness.”

“Almost as crazy as waking up on, on whatever this thing is.” she said.

“A helicarrier.” Fury explained.

She nodded, shaking off the fact that she had no idea what that was. She was only able to handle so many earth shattering events in one day.

“During that attack, your mother, Sarah, she called me. She’s had a direct line to me for G-d knows how long now, but decided that an alien army was the best time to use it.

It took several hours but by the time we got to her,” Fury stopped, not because he himself was in shock, but because he saw Marlena’s expression shift drastically.

Her mouth hung open, gasping as she tried to work up the air for the words of the question she hadn’t thought to ask until now.

“Where's my mom?” She felt guilty for not thinking of her mother's whereabouts the moment she woke up in the medical room. She'd been so concerned with herself that it never even crossed her mind that she had no idea where her only family had disappeared to.

There was a long pause between them, enough to confirm what Marlena was fearing.

She let out a shaky breath, dropping her head down to avoid Fury’s gaze. Gone. Her mom was gone. He hadn’t said it, but he didn’t need to. The entire situation was so insane that she almost laughed as the weight of what she was realizing came to fruition in her mind: her mom had been killed in an alien attack, and now she was in the custody of a secret government agency.

“I’m sorry.” Fury continued. “We did all that we could.”

Marlena sniffed and rubbed the tears away from her cheeks. “Did we win?”

“Excuse me?”

“The aliens. Did we win? Or is all of the human race hiding in the clouds to survive?”

It was the only rational question she could think to ask. It was a hell of a lot easier than trying to come to terms with the fact that her mom was dead.

“Yeah, we won.” he answered solemnly.

Marlena chuckled. “So what does all this,” she waved her hand, gesturing around the room, “have to do with us? Were we some secret weapon or whatever?”

“No, I’m afraid it’s not that interesting.” he pointed to the folder in front of her.

It looked rather casual considering the circumstances and setting. The words ‘For Nick’ were written across the cover in cursive and green ink. Marlena recognized it immediately as her mother’s handwriting.

She opened it, and confirmed the previous owner’s identity as her mom. The first page of the folder was a blank sheet of paper that simply read ‘fuck you. - warmly, sarah’ in the same green ink. Her mother had been a woman of few words, but got her point across when it was needed.

“You two must’ve gotten along.”

Nick chuckled at that. “Yeah, you could say something like that.”

Marlena turned through the pages before her. The next page was a paper id of sorts. Her mother’s picture was paper clipped to the top of the page. It had to have been taken before she was born, because her hair was still relaxed in it, much different from the box braids and natural updos she had worn throughout Marlena’s childhood.

The lines beneath had information that came as a shock to her. The first few were general information; name, date of birth, weight, ect. It was the following ones that made her brain slowly click into place.

“She was a Shield agent?” Marlena asked softly. She looked up at Fury expectantly.

“Yes.” she opened her mouth to say something else, “And no, she wasn’t my daughter.” his intuition was spot on.

Marlena closed her mouth, and read on, trying to scratch the surface of the glacier that she’d just been handed. Line after line, she read about missions that her mother had been on, kills she had confirmed, politicians she had helped save, and governments she had help overthrow. This did a lot to undo the image of a well to-do leftist that she’d been fed her entire life.  

Just as she was about to slam the folder shut, and shove it back at Fury, she noticed another paperclip sticking out at the top of a few pages down. She flipped to it and found another picture paper clipped to a page similar to her mother’s. But where there had been paragraphs of mission recaps for her mother, were lines after line of black sharpie inking it out.

The picture was that of a young black man, no older than thirty when it had been taken. She traced her fingertips across the glossy paper. He had the same long nose that she had, the same complexion, and pouty lips. His head had clearly just been shaved, but it wasn’t hard to imagine him bald, giving him the exact same look as Fury.

“Dad.” she whispered. She looked up at Fury. “He was your son.”

Marlena hadn’t grown up with her father. Her mom had always told her that he’d been killed in a work accident, and seeing as she was only five at the time, she didn’t have much choice other than to believe her. Turns out that she had been right. There was one line at the bottom that read ‘killed in active duty. 27/3/1999’. She looked back down at the picture and sure enough, next to it was a line that read ‘James L Fury’.

“You-you’re my,” she struggled on the next word. Twelve years of wondering where her father’s side of the family had been, and here he was in front of her, but it felt wrong. Her mother was dead, her father had been hidden away in a folder for over a decade, and now here he was in all his government issued glory.

“Grandfather.” she finally managed, stretching out the word, hoping that Fury would jump in and shout “SIKE!” and her mom would pop out from under the table, saying that her dad was actually a drunk deadbeat who had run away. But no such thing happened.

Fury nodded. “Yes.”

“Fuck you.” was all she had to say.

“Marlena,” her name coming out of his mouth felt worse than calling him ‘grandfather’ in the loosest sense possible.

“Fuck. You.” she repeated. “You knew this for twelve years, and just sat back and let us struggle? Let her get killed by _aliens_ ? And just sat up here in this, whatever the hell it is, and did _nothing!”_

It was the most words she’d said all day, pushed out in one heaving breath. She didn’t know what to say next, so instead took to screaming “Fuck, fuck, _FUCK!”_ before putting her head in her hands and crying.

“Do you want to see her?” Fury asked after several long moments.

Marlena looked at him through her tears. Of course she wanted to see her. She wanted to see her mother alive, with a pulse and probably yelling at her for not taking out the trash for good measure, just to make sure she was really alive. But it was this or nothing. And although Marlena would have preferred nothing, her mother’s body seemed like a comfort she never imagined she’d be grateful for.

* * *

Marlena thought of the time she had visited her friend Annie in the hospital when she'd broken her leg. The sterile white curtains in the emergency room had made her feel uneasy. It was all too harsh and chemical for it to be a place where people went to wish someone good health, welcome a baby into the world or kiss loved ones goodbye.

That's how she felt now. An identical white curtain shielded her view of the medical examiner's room. Marlena watched it as if it would jump at a moments notice, revealing whatever horrors it hid.

“Whenever you're ready.” Fury said.

She pinched the palm of her hand, trying to bring herself back from the brink of the whatever sadness was ready to erupt from her. They had only arrived to the medical hall less than a minute ago, but it felt as if she'd been standing there staring at the curtain for an eternity.

She nodded and said nothing more. Fury knocked on the glass. Marlena could see the silhouettes of the coroners on the other side, like shadow puppets in a really fucked up kid’s show. A gloved hand appeared at one end of the curtain and pulled it back.

She didn't know why she expected anything other than her mother's body to be laying across the examination table, but it still came as a shock to her. Her mother was barely recognizable in the harsh white light of the room. Her usually deep brown skin was now a muted shade of gray, her shiny black hair was stiff and frayed around her hair like strips of sandpaper. There was a long gash that started at the base of her neck and disappeared underneath the sheet that covered the rest of her body. It looked so bad that Marlena wondered how she’d managed to stay alive long enough for Shield to get to her, let alone give them Marlena’s location on the other side of the borough.

She forced herself to break her gaze with her mother's body and stared at the floor. “I've seen enough.”

Fury knocked on the glass again, and the curtain was pulled back again, taking her mother away as quickly as she had seen her. Marlena didn't notice that she'd been holding her breath the entire time and let out a heavy sigh.

“You alright?” Fury asked.

“No.” she replied. She leaned forward and placed a hand on the glass to steady herself. She pressed harder for a moment, almost as if trying to phase through it and touch her mother one last time. She balled her hand into a fist, pounded the glass, and walked back from the window.

“What now?” she asked.

“I’ve arranged a service for her next week in DC. She’ll be in the same cemetery as James.”

“As my dad.”

He nodded. He must have been as comfortable referring to James as Marlena’s dad as she was calling Nick her grandfather. Two sides of the same fucked up, familial trauma coin.

“And after that?” she asked.

He paused. She couldn’t read his expression, but knew he was far too organized to fumble over questions that he had had the answers for days ago. Whatever he was about to say, she wasn’t going to like it.

Somehow, her expression managed to drop even more. “Don’t tell me I have to work here.”

“No, no. Nothing like that.” Fury started. “And no offense, but I really don’t think you’d make it in anyway.”

Marlena rolled her eyes.

“New York isn’t an option to return to. The damage was far too great, and seeing as you didn’t have any legal guardians outside of your mother, you’d most likely end up a ward of the state, which I’m sure you don’t want.”

“Yeah, I’d be a fucked up negro orphan Annie”

“So,” Fury said curtly, clearly losing his patience for Marlena’s resistance, “I’ve made arrangements for you. Two of my agents will,”

“No.” Marlena interrupted. “Absolutely not.” She took a step toward him. “You don’t just get to show back up when my life goes to shit, and decide that all of a sudden, you wanna do right by me. That’s not how this works. I get to choose what I do with my life now. I’ve only got one year of school left, I can ride it out in the system.”

“You’d end up in some shithole foster home. They don’t treat kids your age well in the system, and this is New York we’re talking about. Do you know what they do to female wards of the state?” Fury combatted.

Marlena threw up her hands. “I don’t know, I don’t care! I’m not going with whoever these agents are. You can put me in a box with mom if that’s all you have lined up for me.” She turned away from him and crossed her arms.

The exchange had taken her mood from depressed, to annoyed, to whatever mood descriptor there was for stupid. This entire situation was stupid. Did he really expect her to chose two strangers over….over the New York foster care system? Shit, she was being stupid.

She groaned loudly and spoke, still keeping her back turned. “I want James’ pages.”

“You have them.” Fury said.

“You _know_ what I mean. I want them unaltered. Give me all the information, every post it he ever wrote, ever tissue he wiped his ass with, I want it.” she turned around to face him again.

“That’s out of my control. You mother had everything on him, took it when she left Shield.”

“Horse shit.”

“Stop swearing at me.”

“Fuck no. And I call _bullshit_. You expect me to believe that you don’t have copies of your own son’s paperwork? In an agency this big? You’re lying. You either get me what I want, or I’m gone.” she had to keep herself from saying ‘or I’ll kill myself’. It was what she had meant, but figured that wouldn’t help her case.

Fury had surely picked up on what she’d actually wanted to say, but didn’t show it. “Fine. But not until you do as I tell you. I say jump, you ask how high.”

“Feet or meters?”

His expression wavered, showing a small hint at a smile, but it was replaced with a casual expression.“We dock at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. You’ll meet your agents then.”

“Should I set my alarm to analog or military time?”

“Use a sundial.”

* * *

 

Fury had given her another folder. This one was more along the lines of the rest of Shield that she had seen so far; dark, rigid, and depressing. The one with her parents information was stashed underneath her pillow, she was back in the room that she had woken up in.

After they left her mother and the medical hall, Fury escorted her back there, where she was thankful to find a fresh pair of clothes for tomorrow. She showered, and was brought a dinner of chicken pot pie, potatoes, and applesauce. It was clearly just food brought up from the cafeteria, but it dashed away the hunger that Marlena hadn’t noticed during the hellish afternoon that she had had.

She flipped through the folder as she ate. It had the information of the two agents that would be looking after her for the next year. One man, one woman; Clint Barton, listed as an expert marksman, and Natasha Romanov, a spy.  The pictures she’d been given were the same id headshots as the ones for her parents.

Barton looked like he could have been cut from the same cloth as her high school’s ROTC instructor. Same piercing stare, short cropped hair, and that worn down look that trailed after every white man after the age of thirty.

Romanov on the other hand was hard to place. She looked like someone you wanted to kiss or kill, a modern day Kissin’ Kate Barlow. She wondered if all Shield id photos had to make the subjects look like they were ready to pull a gun out on you. Romanov’s expression was just as hard as Barton’s despite her features being softened by the red curls framing her face.

A spy and a sniper, her two guardians for the next year. She had to keep herself from laughing at that fact. Her life was surely going to tumble down a few more rabbit holes in the next coming weeks and months, no use in laughing at the absurdity of it non stop.


	2. Pick Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> couldn't come up with a summary but there's a bit of gore (i guess) towards the end of the chapter so reader's beware

There was only one agent standing with Fury the next morning. Agent Romanov looked far more casual than the picture Marlena had been given let on. Dressed in cropped jean shorts, a pair of worn down converse, and a knockoff college t-shirt from Forever 21 or somewhere similar, she looked more like a preppy summer camp counselor instead of a super-spy who had been battling aliens not even 72 hours earlier. 

The events before that were so uneventful that Marlena was surprised that that was the only surprising information that Fury had for her. Unable to get hold of a sundial the night before, Marlena had to rely on the loud rumbling of the helicarrier engine to wake her up as it landed. She was given a fresh pair of clothes, pain meds, and clean bandages for the mystery scar running down her stomach. One of the doctors that had come by her room had told her that she should be able to handle wrapping and cleaning the wound herself, and left her to do so, but she didn’t. When the doctor had stepped out the room, she folded up the clean bandages and stuffed them into her pants as best as they would fit. 

She was too afraid to look underneath the wrappings and see what damage had been done. She’d heard stories of trauma patients reliving the events that caused said physical trauma after getting glimpses at the damage done to them. Marlena wasn’t too eager to find out if the same would happen to her. Besides, she figured that she’d have to shower eventually. There would be plenty of time to clean and change it when she was somewhere a bit more private than a tiny med bay on a military aircraft. 

After she changed, she was given a quick breakfast of toast, eggs, and orange slices, and was escorted out of the helicarrier by Agent Hill. 

“Did you sleep alright?” Hill had asked. 

“Felt like I was in a coma.” Marlena replied. 

She’d been so worn down by the onslaught of revelations that she fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow. Another alien army could have blown through and Marlena wouldn’t have known any different. 

Once they exited the helicarrier, they entered a giant air hanger. It was larger than any that Marlena had seen on school trips to military museums. There were two other helicarriers lined up farther down the hanger, so large that she was getting a headache trying to wrap her mind around how something that big could fit inside anywhere, and let alone fly. 

Her wonder was cut short though, and she continued behind Hill up through an elevator, that carried them past the ground level, and floor after floor of a building that overlooked the entirety of Washington DC. 

The Potomac snaked lazily through the city, glinting brightly in the early morning sunlight. Marlena traced it with her eyes, racking her brain for which direction she would have to follow to get her back to the home in Virginia that she had lived in before she and her mom moved to New York. 

She didn’t have any vivid memories of her life before New York, but every once in a while, she’d be able to remember the traditional home, with its cozy bedrooms and vegetable garden if she pressed hard enough. Her mom hadn’t kept any pictures of it when they moved, which made sense knowing the history of her family’s line of work, but she never denied the house whenever Marlena would bring it up. 

“Didn’t we have a patio back in Virginia?” she recalled asking one day when she was in elementary school. 

“Yeah, we did.” her mom had replied with a smile. “You actually lost your first tooth when you fell down out there when you were five.”  

They had both laughed. 

“We could get an apartment there.” Marlena had said. “It’d kinda be like being back home.” 

Her mom nodded and her smile faded. “It’s a nice thought.” 

Marlena wanted to say more, but “it’s a nice thought” was her mom’s way of saying “I’m done talking about it.” 

“We used to live over there.” Marlena said to Hill. She was expecting her to reply with “I know.” but instead, Hill nodded and said, 

“I used to go to Virginia Beach every Labor Day. Now I’m lucky if I can get to a PF Chang’s.” 

“Aren’t you technically a government employee? I thought you guys had Labor Day off.” Marlena said. 

“I wouldn’t know what a day off looked like if it shot me at point blank.” 

The elevator stopped and the doors opened to a wide office-like room. It was plain despite its size. There was a desk, and two people: Fury, and a red headed woman that Marlena recognized immediately as Agent Romanov. 

“Director Fury, Agent Romanov.” Hill called as they stepped out of the elevator. 

“Good morning Hill, Marlena.” Fury called back. 

When they reached the desk, Hill walked around to stand next to Agent Romanov, leaving Marlena front and center by herself. 

“Is this my going away party?” Marlena asked. 

“Hm, consider it more of a ‘welcome home’ party.” he replied.

Whether that was a nod to the fact that Marlena used to live not even twenty miles away from here, or a hint to what this was all really about, she didn’t know. She just rolled her eyes and waited for whatever Fury was going to say next. 

“I’m sure you read through the files I gave you last night.”

“Yeah.” she said. 

Fury nodded. “Good, well then I’m sure you don’t need me to explain anything, do you?” 

“I mean, no.” 

There hadn’t been much in the folder aside from the information on Barton and Romanov. She figured that she didn’t need a rundown on ‘pretend these spies are your parents for a year’. So long as she managed to stay out of trouble at school and not get arrested, she doubted that the issue would ever really come up outside of first-day-of-school icebreakers. 

“Well then, this’ll be the easiest part of your year so far.” 

_ That’s optimistic.   _

“So that’s it?” Marlena asked perplexed. “You just hand me a folder and we’re done?” 

After all the hoop and holler he had made about her placement with Romanov and Barton, she thought that she could have at least gotten a more proper send off than this. 

“Was there anything else that you wanted?” Fury asked. 

She shrugged her shoulders. “I dunno. I was just, I wasn’t thinking it was gonna be this  _ casual. _ You made all this sound like life or death yesterday, and now you’re just passing me along like a company email.” 

Fury looked over to Hill and Romanov. They got his silent message, and walked over to a far corner of the room. Once they were out of earshot, he placed a hand on her shoulder, leaned in, and whispered,

“It’s better this way. Trust me.” 

“I don’t speak spy.” Marlena shrugged his hand off her shoulder and stepped back. “You’re gonna have to break that down for me.” 

She was wasn’t being entirely serious. She knew what he was implying, but wanted to hear her say it, wanted to make sure that this was what he really thought was best. Make her convince herself that she could see this as the best option for her in the long run. 

Nick sighed, and remained silent for a moment before whispering. “You’re not safe. Your mother was smart to take you away from me, and everything to do with this place when you were young enough to forget. But all that caution couldn’t protect you two from everything.” 

“I don’t think anything could have protected us from aliens.”

“No. There’s more. When you’re a Fury, there’s  _ always _ more.” he patted her shoulder, and waved for the two women to come back. 

“You can’t just say that and ship me off with a stranger.” Marlena whispered harshly. 

“I know it seems cryptic, but it’ll make sense after a while.” he said. 

“You’re saying that like you expect something to go wrong.” her voice rose. 

“Marlena.” this time it was Romanov talking. 

She paused. There was no use in making a scene. Yelling hadn’t gotten her much yesterday, and she knew that despite the emotional connections, Fury had surely dealt with worse than traumatized teenagers looking for a fight. 

“I don’t have many options other than to trust you, you know.” she started. “Whatever it is that’s meant to make sense better not screw me over anymore.” She turned to face her new guardian, pushed past her and walked back to the elevator. 

No one called after her, or tried to talk her down. Agent Romanov simply followed her, pressed the down button on the elevator, and they both got in. Marlena kept her gaze to the side of the elevator, avoiding whatever expression Fury was throwing her way. When the doors slid shut, and they started downward, Romanov spoke. 

“I can’t tell if you’re stubborn or intuitive.” 

“That’s a nice way of saying I’m hard headed.” Marlena scoffed. 

“No, it’s a very direct way of saying you have a good head on your shoulders. If I were you, I’d probably be doing a lot of the same.” 

Marlena couldn’t tell if she was giving an honest compliment, or just trying to chip away at the walls she had put up for her own emotional stability. 

“Thanks,” she paused, not knowing whether to call her “Agent Romanov”, “Miss Natasha”, or G-d forbid “ _ mom _ ”. 

“Natasha. Natasha is fine.” 

The next half hour was mundane, and Marlena greatly appreciated it. When they left the Shield building, she and Natasha got into an old Subaru station wagon.  _ Really over doing the suburban parent cover.  _  Marlena had thought. 

Natasha didn’t need to tell her where they were going. There were a few boxes loaded into the backseat. Marlena figured that they were just for show, but there was one with her name written across the side in Sharpie. 

Without asking, she reached for the box and pulled it into her lap. At first she thought it would have been filled with some basic stuff; clothes, books, legal papers and the such. But when she opened it, her breath caught in her chest. It was all of her stuff, or stuff from her home in New York. 

Laying on top was her old stuffed polar bear that she had named Slushie in second grade. It had a few scorch marks across its back, but other than that it seemed to have fared well despite surviving whatever damage had been done to her old apartment building. 

She shot a quick glance to Natasha. She was silently navigating the morning traffic, and hadn’t even seemed to pay attention to the fact that Marlena had grabbed the box in the first place. Probably didn’t want to stir up any explosive outbursts. Marlena wiped the stray tears rolling down her cheeks, and cleared her throat, trying to keep it together in front of Natasha. She tucked Slushie between her legs, and went through the rest of the box. 

Her laptop had managed to survive, although it was a little worse for wear. She’d have to wait until she could get a decent wifi connection before checking if it could still boot up. There were some legal papers, as she had predicted, a few shirts and a pair of jeans all with the tags still attached, and a blue composition notebook. 

_ “Marlena, what are you doing?” _

She slammed the box shut and let it slide down off her lap and onto the floor. All of the hustle and bustle from the last couple of days had made her forget about that. Thinking about it ate her up inside, made her insides squirm with the guilt that Marlena had felt the day that she’d decided to go into her mom’s things in the first place. 

“You okay?” Natasha asked.

Marlena didn’t say anything. She turned a knob on the radio, and adjusted the volume as some 80s classics station played. If Natasha was concerned with her lack of response, it didn’t show. They both sat in silence, until Natasha started humming along to “Come On Eileen”. Marlena slid down into her seat, trying to preserve the silence by putting up some very obvious “don’t talk to me” body language. After a few minutes though, her arms started hurting from how hard she had them folded across her chest, and she relaxed, but didn’t turn her face away from the window. 

Natasha pulled off the highway and onto residential streets. The area they drove down was a lot different from that that Marlena’s mom had described to her growing up. She had always talked about the rough DC neighborhoods that she’d lived in as a child. The poverty being so bad that just coming down a street like the one Marlena was riding down now was like a trip to Disney, or a harsh slap in the face when the stark contrast between the two standards of living in one city came into view. 

This neighborhood was clearly the opposite end of what her mom had grown up in. It wasn’t the peak of wealth, but it was a lot nicer than the Brooklyn streets that Marlena had grown up in. The street was dotted with apartment buildings and duplexes. All of the signs told her that this was an area heavy on student housing.

Parents, kids, and young adults Marlena’s age were bustling in and out of moving and pickup trucks, and minivans. The street was lined with boxes of throw away items, and a few yard sales. The street was about as middle American as they came, and right in the heart of the nation’s capital. But it was still so foreign to her. Without even getting to the first stop sign on the street, Marlena knew that she was surely one of the only black people in the area. 

“It’s gonna be a miracle if someone doesn’t call the cops on me by the end of the week.” she grumbled. 

“Don’t say that,” Natasha said sympathetically. “This is a good neighborhood, and we’re new here. You’ll be fine.” 

“Good for some always means worse for someone else.” 

After leaving Virginia, Marlena and her mother had moved to Harlem, stayed with a few family friends before finally settling down in Brooklyn. There had been white kids in her neighborhood, but she tended to stay away from them, they’d grown a little to comfortable tossing certain words around than Marlena was used to. The real issue however, came in when she’d gotten to middle school. 

After one bad summer with a group of bullies, Marlena’s mom had decided it’d be best to send her to a prep school in the richer end of the burrough. It all sounded fine in theory, but Marlena wasn’t prepared for the culture shock that she got on her first day. 

Talk of equestrian camps, language immersion programs, and vacations to France were all a foreign language to her life of day camp at the Y and yearly trips to Coney Island on the Fourth. By the end of her first month, Marlena was secretly pleading that she would get kicked out of school, forcing her back to the comforts of her public school with basketball hoops with no nets and permanently stained linoleum. But the school stuck like glue, and Marlena rode out five years being one of the few black people, and even fewer black girls, with few friends, and little outlook on her life after graduation. 

She hadn’t been a trouble maker, so to speak, but rather caught the blunt end of someone else’s judgement before she could properly state her defense. After she’d been framed for stealing one of the school mandated smart tablets from a classmate in sophomore chemistry, Marlena gave into her falsely planted impish reputation. By the end of her junior year, she’d racked up several detentions, two suspensions, and so many skips that Marlena was really starting to wonder if the school was being paid to keep her around. 

But her grades were always outstanding. If there was one thing Marlena refused to do, it was make a complete ass out of herself. She made sure that her grades were always the top of her class, despite her less than stellar track record with the administration. 

Now that she was thinking about it, the school was probably fine thinking that she had supposedly died in the attack on Manhattan. One less black kid for the students to pretend to like, and one less student to profile. 

Natasha had meant well, but rich white people were the same, no matter the school, city, or state. “Listen, just take it as a fresh start.” she said. “You get a whole new school, and a literal new identity. You’ve got the entire summer to set yourself up, and it’s only for a year. It’ll be over before you know it.”  

Marlena huffed out a sigh. “If you say so.”  _ G-d you sound like a Lifetime movie.  _

They rode in for a few more minutes past the student housing, before finally hitting the more traditional residential side of the neighborhood. It didn’t take much for Marlena to suss out which one was theirs; it was the only house on the street with a moving van, but no movers. It took her a moment to make out that the man in sweat pants and FAMU shirt was Clint. Seeing him so casual really shook up the image of a world renowned assassin that Marlena had firmly planted in her head from the file that she’d been given. 

Natasha pulled into the driveway. “You don’t have to help unpack if you don’t want to. I’m sure that there’s at least a mattress in your bed already, so if you wanna lay down or whatever, you can.” 

Marlena nodded her head. “Okay, thanks.” She got out the car, grabbing her box of things, and started up the lawn to the front door. 

Their ‘house’ was a connected unit, although the neighboring one was vacant. She wondered if it was just a coincidence, or if Shield had purposefully set it up that way to keep any nosy neighbors out of the equation. There was a short bit of yard, enough to have mowing the lawn be a chore. A cement path led up to the three brick steps that gave way to a small porch that connected the front of the two units. 

“Mornin’ Marlena!” Clint called from behind her. She turned and saw him carrying boxes out the back of the truck towards her. 

“Hi.” she said plainly. 

He set the boxes on the ground, heaving and wiping sweat from his brow. “I’m Clint, Clint Barton.” he stuck out his hand. 

Marlena shook it as best she could with the box still occupying her hands. “Nice to meet you.” 

“How’s this D.C. traffic comparing to back home?” 

Marlena shrugged her shoulders. “Traffic is traffic.” 

Clint chuckled. “Yeah well this beats Iowa by a mile.” 

She raised an eyebrow at that. “Didn’t take you for a country guy.” 

“Never woulda guessed Fury had a family.” 

Marlena didn’t say anything to that. As far as she was concerned, her last name was always going to be DuMont, her mother’s maiden name. She had forgotten her father’s last name ages ago, if the one that her mom had told her had even been his real one. When they moved to New York, she was Marlena DuMont. The name on her drivers license read Marlena L DuMont, and she would apply to colleges as Marlena Lysette DuMont. 

“Sorry.” Clint said, trying to brush it off. “None of us are really family guys.” 

“Noted.” Marlena walked up the steps and through the front door. 

Inside there were already boxes pushed aside in the corner of the entryway. To the right there was a staircase, where at the top, Marlena could make out another box with her name across it. More clothes maybe? She doubted that all of her things could have survived Manhattan, but she was eager to find out. 

At the top of the stairs, she half pushed, half kicked the other box across the floor to the first door to the right. It was heavier than she had thought it would have been, hence why it probably only stopped at the top of the staircase and not whichever bedroom was meant to be her’s. It was her luck though that she guessed the right door on her first try. The bedroom was modestly sized, bigger than the one at her old apartment. The room was empty save for an air mattress box underneath the window overlooking the small garden in the back. 

“Home sweet home I guess.” she said. She dropped the box on the floor, and continued to drag the other into the corner of the room that wasn’t in direct view of the doorway. If Natasha said that she didn’t have to help unpack, why should Marlena waste any time offering her help out of politeness? 

She sat on the floor, and opened the second box. It was filled to the brim with papers, thick folders, and a few notebooks. The folders were all stamped with the same Shield logo that had been on the ones she’d been given yesterday, but they had labels slapped onto them haphazardly. Some of them in the corner of the folders, some in the center going right across the Shield logo, and others hanging halfway off the side. All of them had the same message though; Classified. For Director Use Only. 

“It couldn’t have been that easy.” Marlena whispered. She picked up one of the folders and flipped through it. This particular one had to have been about a mission one of her parents went on. The words ‘target’, ‘mission control’, and ‘asset’ stood out to her as she leafed through the pages. 

Tossing it to the side, she reached for one of the notebooks. They were all old composition books, much like the one she had taken from her mother that was now in her things. Could what was in that journal be the same as the ones she had just been given? It was doubtful that that big of a coincidence could happen, but then again, Marlena had never gotten the chance to look through her mother’s journal. She’d been caught red-handed with it, and in her guilt, she stormed out of the apartment, leaving it where she’d found it. When she had finally come back home that evening, her mom had locked herself inside her bedroom, but the journal was sitting on the coffee table with a note that said ‘ask me next time’ on top of it. Marlena had never gotten the chance to open the journal, or the chance to ask questions about what was inside it. 

Without thinking, she chucked the notebook across the room and it slammed against the window and cracked the glass.  

“Marlena?” Clint called from downstairs, “You okay?” 

She didn’t answer. She wanted to throw something else and break the window completely, but what would that get her? A bunch of glass to pick out of carpet and strained concern from Clint and Natasha. Fuck, this was stressing her out already. 

Footsteps came up the stairs and then Clint was poking his head inside the bedroom. “What happened?” he asked. 

She shook her head and started gathering up the papers. “I’m fine.” 

“Are you sure? Here, lemme help you with,”

“Dude!” Marlena shouted, her voice echoing off the walls. “I said I’m fine.” 

He didn’t say anything else. He closed the door behind him as he walked out. When he was gone, Marlena leaned over, buried her face into the carpet, and let out a long, guttural, scream, until she was out of breath and her throat burned. The scream turned into a whimper, which turned into a sob. She lifted her face from the carpet, and curled into a ball, letting out long, heaving sobs with hot tears and snot rolling down her face and onto her clothes. 

It hadn’t even been a full twenty-four hours with Clint and Natasha, and she was already breaking down. She couldn’t take their thick layers of sympathy. It was too synthetic, too cheesy, almost as if they had rehearsed it in the days leading up to this. She wanted to break something, wanted to run out the front door, and take the train back to Brooklyn. Everything couldn’t have been destroyed, there had to be something left. If she went now, she could make it there by early tonight, walk back down those familiar streets, up the steps to her apartment building, and see her mom coming down the stairs to take out the trash before she went to bed. 

“Marlena!” she would say, “Are you ready to talk about that journal? I have someone here who could answer some of your questions.” 

Fury stepped out from behind her mom, holding the journal in one hand, and a picture of her dad in the other. “Pick one.” he said. 

Marlena looked back to her mom, and the sight shook her to her core. She was decaying, more so than she had been on the examination table. Her skin a moldy green, eyes sunken so far into her head that the whites looked like distant halos in a dark cave. 

“Pick one Marlena.” her mother said. The flesh of her face rotted away as she spoke, unhinging her jaw. Marlena closed her eyes, and turned to run out the door, but bumped into a fleshy object. She opened her eyes and was caught in the embrace of her father. 

“Always assume there’s more.” he said, but not with his mouth. The words flowed from a gash across his throat, red and throbbing as he breathed. 

Marlena’s eyes snapped open and she gasped for air against the carpet. She bolted up to her feet and stumbled backward into the wall. 

The light in the room had darkened, it had to be late afternoon by now. Natasha and Clint had clearly been in the room while she was asleep. There was a lamp plugged into the socket on the opposite wall, and a bed frame leaning against the wall with the window. How hard and how long had she been sleeping? 

She walked over to the door and opened it just enough for her to poke her head out. She couldn’t hear any footsteps coming up the stairs or from down the hall. As a matter of fact, it was pretty quiet. She quietly walked down the stairs, where there it looked like Natasha and Clint had at least unpacked all of the kitchen and living room boxes. The only things missing were a tv and dining room table. 

There was a large glass sliding door that took up most of the back wall. Outside was the garden she could see from her bedroom, and who else but Clint and Natasha sitting in folding chairs facing away from the door, chatting away about something, with a box of pizza on the ground between them. Well at least she knew that they didn’t hear her screaming. They hadn’t noticed her yet, which she found a little funny seeing as they were supposed to be world renowned spies. 

She was hungry, but she didn’t want to put up with them right now, especially after her nightmare. Instead, she went to the fridge and was glad to find that there was already a few things in there. Nothing to make a meal out of, but enough to put on her stomach so she wouldn’t have to come back down for a while. She grabbed a handful of grapes, a water bottle, and a slice of bread ( _ dinner of champions  _ she thought to herself), and headed back upstairs. 

Once back in her room, she realized she had absolutely nothing to keep herself occupied for the remainder of the evening. The files and notebooks still strewn across the floor were about as tempting as a viper, but then she remembered her laptop. She set up in the other corner of the room, as if the one she’d been in before would bring back the nightmare, booted up her laptop, and hoped that she at least had enough old stories from middle school to skim through to keep her attention until she felt tired again. If she could even bring herself to sleep again. 


	3. Boiling Over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just as Marlena starts to settle into her new surroundings, unexpected memories uproot her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i swear i didn't mean to abandon this. i was mainly waiting for endgame (ouch) to come out so i could line up the endings of this fic and the movie, but i didn't forget about the 3 of you that read this. i've got an actual ending written out, just gotta, write all of it now  
> 30/4/19 edit: fixed a date that didn't line up with chapter one and added in a section i (somehow) forgot to write in.

The first night in the house had been a rough one. Marlena’s laptop had fared off better than she could have hoped for, and she spent the night browsing through old drawings, school essays, and Warrior Cats fan fiction from middle school. When she had finally managed to doze off, the sky was transitioning to the pale pink of early morning. Not wanting to wake up Clint and Natasha by blowing up the air mattress (and also because she didn’t feel like doing it), she curled into the fetal position and fell asleep.

That day she slept in late, by the time Natasha had finally come to wake her up, it was well past noon. Natasha tried to make small talk, ask her how she slept, but Marlena shrugged it all off with “okay”, “fine”, and most importantly, “did anyone make breakfast?”

“Clint made banana pancakes. They’re cold, and we gotta buy a new microwave, but they’re still pretty tasty.” Natasha had said.

Marlena nodded, and walked past her to find the bathroom. It had occurred to her then that she hadn’t actually taken any time to explore the house the day before, and walked into a storage closet,  and another empty bedroom before finding the correct door. Somebody had been nice enough to leave out some toiletries for her.

As she got undressed to get into the shower, she saw the bandages still tightly wrapped around her midsection. Surprised that she had managed to forget about it in the short time since she’d discovered them. They stung slightly from not being washed since, well whenever she had gotten them.

“Better now than later.” she said to herself. She undid the bandages, not looking down, and winced as the fabric unwinding released the smell of puss and old blood into the bathroom. She made quick work getting the shower on and hopped in, still trying to avoid looking down. But she did run her fingers along it as she gently moved her wash cloth across the scar.

It ran horizontally, but it wasn’t as large as she had thought it had been, only about the length of the tip of her thumb to her wrist. Didn’t mean it wasn’t deep though. She was just glad it wasn’t throbbing or stinging when she ran soap across it, gently feeling out the puckered scars and sutures in her skin.

_At least I’ll have a cool scar for swimsuit season._

When she looked (and smelled) decent, she went downstairs. Clint was sitting at the island stationed in the middle of the kitchen. Just as Natasha had said, there was a plate of pancakes placed next to the stove.

“Morning, well, afternoon.” Clint waved.

Marlena nodded her greeting as she picked up the plate and sat one stool down from Clint. She tore her pancakes and ate them cold without syrup, too embarrassed at the fact that she hadn’t thought to get them before sitting down, and too stubborn to ask Clint where the utensils were.

“How’d you sleep.” he asked.

_Had a nightmare about my zombie parents. So same as usual. How about you?_

“Fine.” she said.

“Was the air mattress comfortable enough for you?”

She nodded.

“We should have a bed delivered here by the end of the week. Did you want to pick out a frame?”

“No.”

Clint didn’t ask her anything else after that. Marlena finished her pancakes, washed her plate, and went back upstairs.

She spent her first four days in the house in that pattern. Wake up, shower, eat, clean up, back to her room, meals at random, and bed. On the fifth day her schedule was disrupted when, just as promised, Clint and Natasha were moving her bed into her bedroom. She had asked for help, just to seem nice (and because she really was grateful for a proper bed), but they said no, and Marlena went downstairs to occupy herself for the fifteen or so minutes it took them to assemble her bed frame.

Those extra minutes downstairs made her realize that she hadn’t left the house since she had first arrived there. The sliding door to the back garden was a welcoming sight now that it was devoid of Clint and Natasha’s constant rounds of twenty questions. She went outside and stood there for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust, even though the clouds were blocking out most of the sun.

It was a dreary day, but the temperature was still warm enough for shorts and flip flops. Marlena hoped that the storm would at least hold itself off until later in the evening, so she could get some decent sleep. She always slept better through storms, especially back in Manhattan with the city sounds mixing in with the wind and rain for the perfect white noise tape. Ever since her nightmare three days before, she had taken to taking naps in the middle of the afternoon or early evening when Natasha and Clint were still awake. At night, she would stay up going through the folders, old journals, and searching up whatever she could on her laptop about her parents. It was a dead end trying to search online, which she should have suspected, but there was one article she had found two days ago in a Virginia Beach news archive covering the vanishing of Marlena and her mother.

 

**_Search Underway For Missing Mother and Daughter_ **

 

_April 1, 1999_

 

_Wednesday night, local police were alerted to investigate the disappearance of part time museum tour guide Sarah Fury, and her daughter, five year old Marlena Fury. Authorities were brought into the situation after Marlena failed to show up for school two days in a row with no notification from either of her parents. Both Ingram Preparatory School and the Virginia Beach Art Museum tried to get in contact with Sarah, and her husband James Fury, but with no success._

_Evidence so far consists of security footage from neighbor Lucille Bank’s home security system, which showed the mother and daughter evacuating their home on March 29 at  approximately 3:37 A.M. Video also showed footage of James Fury leaving the home on March 24 around 6:22 A.M., but footage of Fury returning was not present._

_There have been no records of domestic disturbances in the six years that the Fury’s have resided in VA Beach, but police have not ruled out foul play. As of now, the only suspect is James Fury. VA Beach Prep and local police are holding a search party for the mother and daughter this weekend, and are in need of volunteers. For more information, please reference the contact information for the school and police department listed below. Please come forward if you have any information._

 

There had been two other articles updating the progress of the search party and a single news segment with an interview of a search party volunteer and neighbor, but any updates of their lives in Virginia went cold in summer of '99.

That put her on the news website for Manhattan. She knew it was a long shot searching for her mom’s name in such a densely populated area where far more crazier things than two runaways from Virginia hiding there. On the front page, there was a banner going across the top that read “Submissions for Manhattan Alien Attack Memorial.” with another link that directed her to the growing list of names taken in the very event that placed her here.

Seeing the hundred or so names on the first page of the list had felt like a punch to the chest. It had finally sunk in that people other than her had been affected by the attack as well. She felt selfish for not considering it before, but seeing those names had also made her reconsider her situation. Fury had said that if she hadn’t been rescued, she would have been put into the system, which was surely the fate of so many other kids her age (and may younger) who had been caught in the crosshairs. In a way, it made her grateful for Fury’s interference. Well, not truly grateful, but more understanding.

In the back garden, Marlena walked out to the middle of the grass. She wasn’t wearing shoes, couldn’t even remember where she had tossed them after her first night, feeling the soft pricks of the blades on her skin. She closed her eyes, and did a few yoga stretches that she had picked up from YouTube videos, feeling all of the physical tension in her body ease up after five days of sitting cross legged and sleeping on a so-so air mattress. She let out a low moan, her body grateful for the change in routine.

When she was finished stretching, she walked over to the flowerbed running along the fence. It wasn’t an impressive one, clearly just planted a few days ago when Clint was tinkering around out here. Marlena had heard he and Natasha out there almost every day, and she figured this must have been what they were doing. She knelt down to examine the buds, a few of them had started sprouting, and from what little she could remember from the botany elective she had taken in tenth grade, these were most likely tulips. Marlena actually kind of hated those flowers, how they were so popular when there were literally dozens of other, more exotic and challenging plants to maintain existed. What was the point in caring for something that was so easy?

Among the other plants, there was a tomato plant, more vanity flowers, and a small patch of lettuce in the far corner of the garden. Clint and Natasha were clearly new to maintaining a garden, because even Marlena’s city slicker self knew that it was still far too hot for any kind of leafy green plant to survive, even in the shade of the neighboring tomato plant. She made a note to tell them that when they came out of her room. She was looking forward to having the upperhand over them for once, even if it was something as trivial as gardening. She got up from her spot on the grass, and walked back inside to grab the tea kettle off the stove, filled it with water, and proceeded to water the lettuce patch.

“Green thumb much?” Natasha said behind her.

Marlena jolted at her disturbance, almost dropping the kettle. “Jeezus.” Marlena said.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to creep up on you. Need any help with that?”

“Uh, no. But you two need help with this.”

Natasha laughed at that. “Hey, that one there looks okay.” she pointed to the browning lettuce patch.

“It’s too hot for leafy greens to grow. They’re just gonna shrivel up.”

“Huh, I just thought it was all water and sunshine.”

“You should probably get some planter boxes too. Everything’s way too crowded back here, nothing’s gonna grow well enough to harvest.” Marlena said.

Natasha nodded. “You seem to be really into this.”

Marlena shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like I have anything else to really be into right now.”

“I saw a green house somewhere pretty close by the other day. Maybe we can go there and get some supplies later on today.”

Natasha wasn’t asking, which Marlena appreciated. She hated feeling like she was constantly being interviewed. She nodded. “But we should probably wait until tomorrow. These clouds don’t look promising.”

Natasha let out a small laugh. “You noticed the rain but watered the wilting plants anyway?”

Huh, Marlena had been so engrossed in her task that she had forgotten about the rain just that quick. “We can just cover them up.” she said.

Nat nodded. “I think we have some tarps in the storage closet. Clint probably knows where they are.”

“I’ll…I’ll go ask him.” Marlena knew that Nat had only said that to get her to talk to Clint, which was fair. She was going to be living with them for the next year, and despite her determination to be as off putting and jaded as possible over the situation, she should have known that she wouldn’t be able to hold that animosity until the start of the school year, let alone an entire year.

“Good. I’m pretty sure he’s still upstairs.” Natasha said.

Marlena nodded and walked past her back into the house, and upstairs to find Clint. He was at the end of the hall, coming out of the door to the master bedroom. He saw her before she could say anything.

“Marlena, hey.” he sounded slightly surprised that she was there, which Marlena couldn’t really blame him for. After an entire week of her hiding in her room for more than twelve hours, she would have been surprised to see her too. “Your bed’s done. Didn’t know what corner you wanted it in, so we just put it by the window where your air mattress was.”

She nodded. “Okay, thanks.”

He stood there, almost expecting her to have something else to say. Maybe he and Natasha had some secret telepathy that no one had told Marlena about.

“Do you, do you know where the tarps are?” she finally asked.

Clint’s face perked up a little. “Yeah. They’re in the closet downstairs. What’d you need em for?”

“I was just, watering the plants out back, but somehow forgot that the rain later on today is gonna drown em, so I wanted to cover them up.” she replied.

“Didn’t take you for much of a garden person. You know, coming from Manhattan n all.”

“I took a botany elective like two years ago.”

“Well, I’ll be sure to keep you stocked up on seeds.”

Outside, thunder rolled across the sky. “Clint, those tarps.”

“Yeah, right, sorry.” he made his way down the hall and guided her down to the closet under the stairs. They had to dig through a couple of storage bins before finding the tarps, and by the time they finally dug them out, it was already raining. Natasha was sitting in the kitchen, waiting to help them, and the three of them ran out into the garden, hastily threw the tarps over the plants, and ran back inside.

After a very long complaint from Natasha about how much summer in the south sucked, they made lunch, more pancakes, the only thing that wasn’t leftover delivery or take-out. Marlena could feel her layers peeling back as she sat with them and ate. She didn’t talk about much past botany, but it was a good enough start for her.

The next morning was still bleary, but the weather forecast only said that the rain had passed. Clint had come to wake her up, knocking on the door and telling her to get up if they wanted to get to the greenhouse early.

“It’s too early.” Marlena answered back.

“It’s almost eleven.” he replied.

She groaned, told him she’d be ready in fifteen minutes, and got out of bed. Once she made it downstairs, Clint was by himself at the island.

“Where’s Natasha?” she asked.

“Got called to do some work today.” he answered.

“I thought I was work.”

He laughed at that. “This is more like long term freelancing.”

“Oh so you definitely don’t get paid enough for this then.”

“Can’t put a price on faking parenthood.”

Marlena rolled her eyes. They ate a quick breakfast of toast and eggs, and headed out to the car. She couldn’t believe how much she had sheltered herself in the last week that everything happening around her seemed foreign, although actually going out into the city she lived in for the first time played more of a factor. She watched the houses and stores roll by as Clint first drove them to the greenhouse Natasha had told her about the day before.

“How about we divide and conquer.” Clint said as they got out the car and walked to the entrance. “You get plant food and fertilizer, and I’ll get the planters.”

Marlena gave him a thumbs up and went to grab a shopping cart and they split up to the two ends of the store. She was fine for the first couple of minutes, comparing prices and trying to remember which brands were literal shit (the best stuff), and picking out gloves and shovels. But as she sank further and further into the store, hearing the sounds of the customers, voices of employees directing them to their desired products, and feeling the rattle of the cart’s wheels as she walked down the aisles, everything started to push in against her.

The entire setting felt too fabricated, too TV Land-ish to feel completely real to her. People still went out and just bought stuff for their yards? Just left their house and actually did shit as if the world hadn’t been rocked to its core a few weeks prior? Sure they were probably all freaked out about it just as much as any normal person would have been, but seeing the world be so, so normal, so absolutely normal, made her look for threats she knew weren’t there.

She gripped the handle of the cart to keep her hands from shaking, but they were slick with sweat, and she had to keep wiping them on her shorts. An elderly man coming around the corner startled her and she had to push past him without even saying sorry. She stood by the front of the store, waiting for Clint to appear with the rest of the stuff so they could go. When he finally reappeared, he asked her if she’d found everything okay, and Marlena fumbled through her answer.

“Y-yeah. I um. Yeah I got it all, everything.” she wiped her hands back on her shorts, Clint’s eyes followed her nervous movements.

“Hey, you good?” he whispered.

Marlena breathed in through her nose. “Yeah, yeah I’m fine.”

“Marlena, did someone say something to you?”

“No. I’m fine. Let’s just go.” she said, turning her cart toward the row cash registers.

Clint paid for their stuff and walked back outside to go back home. “Do you think you can make it to the grocery store or-” Clint’s question was cut off by the sound of something popping loudly and rapidly on the other side of the parking lot.  

Her memory flooded like a dam, dragging in every moment from Manhattan to the forefront of her mind. She dropped to the ground and crouched behind the car closest to her, eyes closed, hoping to suppress the rapid fire of reactions going off inside her. Fear, confusion, desperation, and oddly, curiosity. She opened her eyes and there she was again, back on the street thundering with gunfire and distant screams and roars. She looked over onto the asphalt, and saw a body almost split in two by gunfire.

Ahead of her, the ground shook. She didn’t need to look to see what was there, she’d already seen one of those... _things_ a block ago when she was running for cover. But against her best judgement, she slowly unfolded her legs from beneath her, and looked over the trunk of the car.

The alien had its back turned to her, the ground beneath it cracked as if it had just jumped from the top of one of the buildings. Had it seen her from above? Marlena didn’t wait to find out. She dashed from behind the car in the opposite direction away from the alien. But before she made it halfway down the street, hands were on her. She let out a scream, and kicked her legs, trying to escape, but then she heard her name.

“Marlena. _Marlena!”_ Clint said, his voice burrowing through the memory, pulling her back to present times.

She snapped her eyes open, and she was still behind the car, only this time, there was no alien. Just Clint crouched in front of her with a firm grip on her shoulders, and a very concerned mother with her two children standing behind him.

“Marlena,” Clint said again, quieter this time as he scooted a little closer to her. Still shaken from the memory, Marlena uttered “don’t” under her breath, and tried to pull out of his grip. “It’s okay. You’re safe. It was just a car backfiring.” he assured her.

She tried to pull the words from her mouth, try to give something that would wipe that concerned look off everyone’s face. Instead, she bit down on her lip to keep it from quivering as tears burned the back of her eyes. She took in a breath in a last effort to push the words out, but instead let out a gasping cry.

Clint pulled her to him, cradling her as he picked her up and walked back to the car. She cried all the way home, loudly and pathetically, huddled in the backseat with the bags of fertilizer and plant food. At one point she heaved so hard she thought she was going to throw up, but instead, the words she had been searching for in the parking lot had finally made their way out of her chest.  
“ _Mom.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no promises but i'm gonna ride out this endgame high and try to get out a couple chapters in the next couple weeks. thanks for reading y'all


	4. Impractical

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fixed something minor in chapter 3, short chapter but next one will be longer i promise. i'm tellin y'all i gotta get all this out before the endgame hype in me dies out

This was her third trip to the bathroom tonight, but this time, her trek down the hall was a bit more urgent than having to go number one. She cursed as she stumbled down the hall and fumbled with the doorknob, just barely making it to the toilet before vomiting. Marlena hadn’t eaten much over the last two days, and most of what she was throwing up was bile, which did nothing to ease her pain. 

After she and Clint had come back from the greenhouse, he had carried her up to her bedroom and let her cry until she fell asleep. When she woke up at some point in the night, there was tray with a bowl of soup with a sandwich on her nightstand. She had tried to eat, but lifting tray into her lap felt like too much effort. She downed the glass of water that had come with the meal and turned back over. She didn’t sleep much, didn’t want to actually. She had been having another nightmare as she slept, this time with the aliens from Manhattan getting their hands on her and pulling her limb from limb. 

The next morning, she had fallen back into her routine of staying in her room for hours, except this time, there were periodic knocks on her door from either Clint or Natasha. Neither one of them had told where Nat had been the day before, but Marlena didn’t much care. Their presence had been comforting that first day after her panic attack, she knew that they would come let her know that she wasn’t back in that nightmare, that she was safe, but by the second night, she wanted to be left alone. 

Natasha had come to check on her first on the second night, bringing some water and saltines with her. “You have to at least eat something.” she had said. 

“Just leave em there.” Marlena said with her head under the covers. Natasha didn’t need instructions as to where “there” was, all of her food from the day had been on the nightstand. Natasha placed the crackers and the water down, and left the room. 

In a health class two years ago, her teacher had gone over the five stages of grief with her class; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When she’d first read about them in the lesson, she had thought back to when her father had been killed, trying to dig up any memories of how and when she had gone through all five stages. 

She definitely remembered the depression stage. On her first day of school in Manhattan, she had cried bloody murder for her father when her teacher had asked her about her family during ice breakers. The teacher had called her mother, but unfortunately, she couldn’t come pick her up, and Marlena had to spend the rest of the day in the nurse’s office, heaving heavy sobs into the stiff pillow she’d been given. 

As for the other four stages, she couldn’t remember them. It’s possible that the memory of her shouting at her mother for moving them to New York had been apart of anger, but that had been when she was twelve and had gotten into trouble at school for fighting. 

Now, Marlena wasn’t even sure she was in any of the five stages. They all seemed to have tied a knot in her chest, the ends of each thread dangling loose, and at random, one of them would pull too hard and trigger a memory, an emotion, and a usually physical reaction. Earlier that night, Marlena had actually gotten onto her knees and prayed, something she hadn't done, well, ever now that she thought about it. Her mother hadn't been religious, holidays were treated as bonus days off and Sundays were just an extra day for chores or cheap matinee movies. Marlena would never have described herself as an atheist, especially not after the attack. If aliens existed, who was to say some almighty deity that created every living creature didn't either. 

She had gotten on her knees at the foot of her bed, the way she'd seen in books and TV shows over the years. She didn't know who to pray to, or what to pray for, but decided that going straight to G-d and asking to take the pain away was a good enough start. When she was finished, she had felt a tad bit pathetic about it. It hadn't felt like a genuine prayer, and she sure as hell wasn't too eager to do that again, but she had bargained to be devout if G-d, if he was even really there, would just do  _ something _ about everything she had been going through. Marlena figured that that had to be some kind of bargaining. 

She didn't once feel that she was in denial about her situation. Being uprooted and having a traumatic flashback made it pretty clear that all of this was real. The anger was perpetual, she was constantly spitting at the image of Fury in her head for not doing something earlier in her life. The least he could have done was help out with money, mom's stubborn attitude about it or not. But she was mad at her mom too. How stubborn and ignorant could she have been to deny Fury access to them and deny Marlena information on her father? Depression? Please, she had already been clinically depressed since she was sixteen, only difference now is that she might have been able to get to therapy.

Acceptance felt like a world away. Everything was still so fresh. It felt more like a goal to work toward than something that would happen on its own. Part of her felt like asking Natasha and Clint how long it had taken them to accept a death, she figured that they had to have had team members or even family members killed in their line of work. She decided against it, for now anyway, not wanting to bring up their own traumatic memories. Another part of her thought asking Fury would help, but that was completely out of the question. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing her. He had opted out of that years ago when he sent her father on the mission that killed him. 

But at the same time, she knew he was the only other person within close enough proximity to her life to know the pain she was going through. Sure, her mother had cut Fury out of her life, but Fury had lost his daughter in law, and almost his granddaughter. He came off as stoic, but it had to be eating him alive knowing that he could have done something sooner, and didn’t. The thought of talking to Fury again made Marlena’s stomach twist from nerves, but she knew that was her best option of getting some sort of advice of dealing with this. 

Thinking of Fury made her think of those first confusing hours after waking up on the helicarrier. It made her think of seeing her mom’s body. A split second of memory sent Marlena running for the toilet, gagging and swearing as she pummeled into the bathroom, covering her mouth with her hands to stop her vomit from getting across the floor and toilet lid. She went for the sink instead, coughing and hacking until she was dry heaving. 

The bathroom was right across the hall from the master bedroom, so of course, the door swung open, and there was Clint with Natasha sitting up groggily in bed behind him. He didn’t get a chance to ask if she was okay, because Marlena slammed the door shut behind her. 

Anger again? Maybe, she hoped not. It was too late and she was already starting to feel like a burden on the two of them. The last thing she wanted right now was to have them clean up her bile off the floor at one in the morning. She grabbed her bath towel, ran it under cold water in the tub, and started wiping up the mess. It was sloppy, and the smell still lingered, but she figured that she could deal with that in the morning. 

She left the bathroom, met with Clint still standing in the doorframe, now with Natasha at his side. “I want to talk to Fury.” she said. 

* * *

  
  


It was another two days before Marlena’s request was fulfilled. She was out back planting the peony seeds that she’d picked up from the greenhouse when she heard the quiet slough of the sliding door. She looked over her shoulder and saw Fury standing there, looking far more casual than he had when they’d met almost two weeks ago. 

“Hello.” Marlena said not getting up from her spot. She was trying to throw up the attitude that she had the first day she had met him, but it was too hard. Despite the fact that she had called this meeting, and wasn’t at his complete mercy anymore, she felt more vulnerable than she had that first day. 

“Afternoon.” Fury said. He noticed the trowel in her hand. “Need any help with that?” 

“No, this part is easy. But you can fill up the watering pot.” she instructed, pointing the trowel to the aforementioned pot. 

“Yes ma’am.” he walked across the grass, picked up the pot, and went back inside to fill it. “Where do you want me to water?” he asked when he came back. 

“The lettuce is overwatered, so you can leave that. Just get everything else. Don’t use the whole pot though. I don’t want my plants washed away when there isn’t a storm.” This was easier. Commanding him to do something as simple as tilting a pot of water over plants felt like a small victory. He had been so walled up about her parents’ files, that this small instruction felt like a personal triumph. One step closer to acceptance? She didn’t know, didn’t really care at the moment. Looking at Fury crouching over the small garden with a sunflower print watering pot was something that would stay with her forever. 

Marlena let out a small laugh looking at him. He glanced over at her. “What?” 

She shook her head. “Nothing. Just wondering how your employees would say if they saw you doing this.” 

Fury shot a glance over his shoulder, and Marlena followed suit. Clint was standing at the glass door, but quickly turned to walk back towards the front end of the house when they saw him. “Guess we won’t have to wait long to find out.” 

He turned back around and finished his task. “So, what made you give me a call?” he asked. 

This was the part she hadn’t planned out. She knew that she wanted to talk to him but in the two days of waiting, hadn’t thought of how to breach the subject. In that moment, she decided hitting the nail on the head would be the best course of action. No point in drawing out what was surely going to turn into a painful conversation. 

She moved from her knees and sat cross legged on the grass. “How do you do it?” she started. “How-how do you deal with….the aftermath, of losing someone close to you?” She kept her eyes on her hands in her lap as she talked, not wanting to see whatever flash of emotion would go across Fury’s face. 

She heard him sigh, and the rub of his jeans as he sat down on the grass. “First time’s always the hardest, I can tell you that.” he said. 

“Who was your first time?” 

“Your grandmother. Cancer got her just after your dad graduated high school.” 

“No, I mean. When people die like mom did?” she said. She opened her mouth to continue, but knew what she was going to say would come off rudely. “I mean...cancer sucks, but you can like, mentally prepare for the end. You know it’s coming.” She looked at Fury from the corner of her eye. He wasn’t looking at her, his eyes trained on the newly budding tomato plant. 

“How long do you deal with losing someone at  _ work _ .” she said. She peeled her eyes away from her hands and made herself look at his profile. He wasn’t looking at her, but she couldn’t blame him. She wouldn’t want to look at her either after what she had just said. 

“Your father was my first.” he said at last. Something inside her twinged when he said ‘your father’ instead of ‘James’ or ‘my son’. “He was my pride, light of my life, all that gushy Hallmark card stuff. I wanted to die after I heard he had been killed.” he let out a sigh. “And then to have you and your mother disappear right after,” he paused and shook his head. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. Felt like the world was falling out from under my feet and all I could do was watch.” 

Marlena was quiet for a while. Had he ever told this to anyone before? “How often do you think about him?” 

“Every day.” 

Silence again. 

It should have been an obvious answer to her, but she was still scrambling for what to say next. Who wouldn’t think about their dead child every day? A murdered one no less. Marlena wondered if the tables had been switched, if she had died instead of her mother, would she be having this conversation with him instead? Would she have kept going in her life of solitude, still silently blaming Fury for the death of her husband, and now her only child? When she remembered her prayer from days before, she wondered if her mom was in the afterlife, worrying sick about when Marlena was going to be reunited with her. A morbid thought, but it also made her think of her parents reunited, now only waiting for Marlena to join them. Would they want her now or later? Would they want Fury when he eventually died? Hopefully he would die. Marlena didn’t want to go three for three on family members killed in tragic events. 

“I didn’t think about dad every day.” she said at last. “I couldn’t.” It sounded harsh and selfish, but it was the truth. After being transferred into private school, the relentless bullying about her father’s absence became too much. She pushed any hope she had had as a child that he would come back, any memory, any inkling of him in her mind as far away as she could. 

“It wasn’t practical for me. I mean, mom thought about him enough for the both of us. And I guess you did too.” 

“Practicality and grief don’t go hand in hand.” Fury said. 

“I chose what I needed to get through what was in front of me. Dad wasn’t it, so, I chose practical.”  

“Yeah well, if it weren’t for me, you never would have had to make that choice.” The guilt in his voice was heavy, and when Marlena processed what he had said, she almost got mad. But as she looked at him, she knew there was no point in her anger. 

He had lost his son, and taken away her father. This wasn’t a man who had come here to be berated by her anger, no matter how much she felt that he deserved it. This was someone who could understand her, someone who had come close to understanding a fraction of the pain that he had been carrying for over a decade. 

Was it a relief for him? As much as this had to have hurt, was he at least glad that there was someone who shared the pain? Marlena remembered a phrase she had read once in a book a few years ago that went ‘who embalms the undertaker when he dies?’ Who saves the heroes when the jobs all done? 

She lifted her hand from her lap, held it palm up between them, and waited. After a moment’s pause, she felt Fury’s hand in her’s. He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. 

“I’m sorry you had to make that choice.” he said.

“Just work to make sure neither one of us have to make it again.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that quote about the funeral home is from "fun home" so take a wild guess at what kinda people marlena goes for


	5. Eight Times On Its Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One ending, and one shitty beginning.

The following week, Marlena, Clint, Natasha, and Fury arrived to a cemetery in central DC for her mother’s funeral. Natasha had bought her a new black dress and a pair of heels to wear for the occasion, which was a nice gesture, but Marlena was cursing herself for not bringing flats as she trudged through the grass to her mother’s plot, the heels of her shoes sinking into the soft sod with every step. Clint saw her struggling and offered an arm to steady herself on, and she took it. 

Fury was already at the grave, well, graves. Next to the uncovered grave with her mother’s casket waiting to be lowered in, was her father’s. Marlena had never been to see her father’s grave before. After he had died, she and her mother had left Virginia in such a hurry, that there hadn’t been time for a proper funeral to be planned. She wondered if Fury had invited her to the one he had held for him. She wondered again if his body was even down there. All her life, she had been told that he’d been killed in the line of duty, nobody ever told her how. Now, after Manhattan, she was picturing fiery explosions instead of a random shoot out in a field. 

“Good morning.” Fury said as they approached.

Marlena couldn’t say anything. She just wiggled her fingers at him, eyes trained on her mother’s casket. It was strange, seeing such a massive thing meant to contain her mom’s tiny 5’3 frame. Was it meant to keep her in or keep the elements out? It felt stupid to think that the former was the purpose, but the nightmare of her mother and father’s decomposing bodies from the week before came across her mind again, and a chill shot up her spine. She shivered and Clint noticed. 

He tapped her arm where their arms were interlinked. “You okay?” 

She nodded, still inaudible. 

Natasha stood on her other side, Marlena saw her reading the epitaph on her father’s grave. 

 

_ James L Fury _

_ December 15th 1967-March 27 1999 _

_ Some of them are crowned, Some of them are downed _

_ Some are lost and never found _

_ But most have seen it all, and they all have a story _

 

Marlena knew the line, it was from the Nina Simone song  _ Stars.  _ Her mother used to play the  _ Let It Be Me  _ record a lot when she was younger, but had stopped about two years after her father’s death. Once, just after she had turned seven, Marlena remembered waking up to the sound of the record drifting into her bedroom, or rather, the bedroom where she and her mother were sharing a bed at the time. She had crept out into the hallway and looked into the living room to find her mother eyes closed, swaying side to side in a slow circle, arms stretched aloft, holding onto an invisible partner. 

Marlena sat crouched in the doorway of the living room for the entire song, she didn’t know how long it had run for, but when it stopped and her mother turned her back to the record player to turn it off, she quietly made her way back to the bedroom. That same night was the first time she had heard her mother cry. Soft, concealed cries and whimpers floated into the bedroom, Marlena had wanted to go out and sit on her lap and hug her, tell her that it was going to be okay. But she didn’t. 

That was the last time she had heard her mother play that record. But somehow, all these years later, she knew it the instant she saw the lyrics. 

“Marlena,” Fury’s voice called her out of the memory, “do you have anything you’d like to say?” 

She took her eyes off the casket and up to Fury. She didn’t know what she was expecting, a minister maybe? There had to be some kind of formality for this. She had thought that Fury was going to give a eulogy, maybe even Clint or Natasha, Marlena was assuming that they had to have known her parents, even if for a short time before her mother fled the system. 

“Y-yeah. I guess so.” she said. 

She let go of Clint’s arm and stepped carefully over to the headstone. 

 

_ Sarah Y DuMont _

_ May 19 1968-May 25, 2012 _

_ Few Could Compare _

 

It felt impersonal compared to what was engraved on her father’s headstone, but what else was there to say? Nobody had come to ask Marlena ‘oh by the way, what do you want inscribed on your dead mom’s grave?’. Fury surely wouldn’t know anything good enough about her from recent years that would make an appropriate memorial. Marlena thought on the sentence, trying to come up with something halfway decent way to commemorate her mom. 

“Um, thank you Fury, for, for putting this together.” she started, giving him a small nod. “I really did try, I did try to hate you for all this, and I still kind of do. But I’m sure a funeral, even one this small, is a luxury so many families back home would have liked to been afforded for their lost ones.”

She paused. What the hell else was she supposed to say? _Thanks for coming out, weather’s nice, gonna try not to cry for the hundredth time this week?_ _We’ll be serving refreshments of leftover meatballs and cream soda later on._

She just wanted this to be over with. She had been mourning her mom for the last week and a half, at this point, she would have been fine knowing that her mom was resting next to her father. Foregoing this funeral altogether would have been less painful than trying to cough up a half decent eulogy. 

“I never knew my mom as, I only ever got to know her as my stubborn mom. My mom that held onto secrets like a lifeline. My mom who liked, Stella Rosa? That’s a wine right?” she asked looking at Natasha. She nodded her answer. “But, I guess no kid ever really thinks of their parents as like, people, or at least the people they were before they were their parents. One of my teachers told my class once that our parents know us our entire lives, but kids only know their parents for part of their lives. I knew it was true, but I never really knew just how little I knew about her.

_ Few could compare. _ I guess that’s kinda true. Few kids can say that their parents had an entire double life hidden from them. Maybe I would have thought that was cool if I was younger, less,” she took a deep breath, “less traumatized. Maybe I’d still be angry? I don’t know. I didn’t get that version. She didn’t get that version of her life where she got to tell me everything herself. It would be nice to have gotten that.” 

She stopped. She was starting to sound selfish and she hated herself for it. But what else was there to say?  _ Mom, I miss you, but I’m still angry that you kept a literal lifetime of secrets away from me. Rest in peace though.  _ This is why she just wanted to see her put in the ground, it would be so much easier to live with the memories turned bittersweet over the last couple of days than live with the reality that her mom had lied to her for twelve years, maybe even her entire life. 

She ran her hand across the smooth top of her mother’s casket. “I love you. Eight times on its side.” she whispered. 

When she was younger, whenever Marlena would meet someone new, she would say their name eight times. Her mother had told her that doing that meant you would always remember that person, because an eight on its side was an infinity sign. Marlena hadn’t done that after some kids in her sixth grade class had laughed at her for doing it to introduce herself, but it felt good saying it now. It felt like the most honest and true way to say goodbye to her mother. 

She took her place next to Clint again, and waited for something else to happen. Fury was standing beside her dad’s gravestone, his expression worn. Was he seriously not going to say anything? Not that she could blame him. It was hard enough for her to say something more or less coherent. The guilt and grief coursing through him had to be twice that of what Marlena was feeling. Just standing there and holding it together was a gold medal effort. But it didn’t feel complete. She wanted someone to say something else. But no one did. 

After a few more moments of silence, Marlena turned and walked back across the grass toward the car. Her feet sank into the grass again, and she groaned in anger before kicking off the heels and walking the rest of the way barefoot, leaving the shoes behind. 

She sat the side of the car facing away from the graves, pulled her knees to her chest, and cried quietly. It was a surprise to her that she still had enough tears left in her body after a week of nothing but tears. Sitting there now, she felt that she was about to dissolve into a puddle on the hot asphalt and evaporate in the sun. Her crying name was leagues calmer than what she had been doing the past few days. It was controlled, quiet, didn’t leave her feeling guilty for putting up a scene. She let the tears gather into a dark stain on the top of her dress where her knees were pulled up against her. 

Eventually she heard footsteps coming toward the car. Natasha appeared first, standing by the trunk of the car. “Hey.” she said. 

Marlena didn’t respond, just turned slightly so some of her back was facing the redhead. 

“You did good back there. I’m proud of you.” Natasha said. 

“Thanks.” Marlena grumbled.

“Fury wants to talk to you.”

Marlena shook her head. “Can we just go?” 

Natasha didn’t say anything, just opened the back door for her. Marlena got inside and laid across the backseat. In her heart, Marlena felt that Fury had done enough for now. Given her a place to stay, opened up about her father, and put this together, even if he didn’t have the nerve to say something like she had. But it was enough for now. 

_ Just make sure neither one of us has to make that choice again. _ Her words from last week rang through her head. The road to moving past grief and back to practicality had started. Marlena just hoped it was more evenly paved than the one that had pushed her to grieve so hard in the first place. 

* * *

 

**_Three Months Later, September 2012_ **

 

Sitting in the backseat, dressed in her navy blue skirt, white button up, and the blue and white checkered jacket that she prayed would pass the school’s dress code, Marlena felt ridiculously childish. Natasha was driving, with Clint quietly jamming to some Stevie Nicks song on the radio. If this had been any other day, she would have been looking lazily out the window, watching the gaggle of elementary school kids shouting and crying, not wanting to leave their parents, or playing Pocket G-d on her phone. But today, she was slumped down in the backseat, trying to make herself look as miserable as possible. 

She kept shooting glances into the rear view mirror, she couldn’t see herself, but could just make out Natasha’s eyes, focused and untelling as she focused on the road.

“I still don’t see why I couldn’t just be homeschooled.” she grumbled.

“Marlena, you have no reason to be homeschooled. You’ll be fine.” Clint said up front.

“Yeah, if by ‘fine’ you mean waiting for a panic attack, then yeah. I’ll be perfect.” 

“You’re not being homeschooled.” Natasha said. “Besides, if you were, you’d probably just be complaining about wanting to go to a regular school. You’d be bored being around the house without kids your age.”

“Fair, but did it have to be a private school? I hated my last school. Was public school not good enough for me all of a sudden?” Marlena groaned.

“Yes, actually.” Natasha said in a matter-of-fact way. “None of the public schools around here come close to where your marks on your transcript and placement tests were. You’d just be bored going over watered down material you already know.” 

“I could just go to public school and get an easy ticket to valedictorian!” 

“That’d be cheating.” Clint said, a twinge of humor in his voice.

“Oh for the love of,” Marlena put her hands on her face and grumbled a line of swears. 

The three of them had been going back and forth about the school selection over the course of the last month. Marlena had been adamant about going to a public school, somewhere she could be with other black kids and fade into normalcy again. She couldn’t have given two shits about what her grades were, she would excel anywhere she went. She just knew that she wouldn’t be able to deal with the snobbish white kids that were going to reign supreme at her new school. Especially now after a thorough diagnosis of PTSD and anxiety, coupled with a Zoloft medication that mellowed her out like she’d taken half a pack of Benadryl. 

The last couple of weeks had coasted by in a haze consisting mostly of shopping for clothes,  _ finally _ getting a new phone, and going back and forth to Yuell Campbell’s School for Advanced Academics for placement testing. Technically, she shouldn’t have had to take placement exams at all, but because her cover of a new-to-town kid from Oregon wouldn’t exactly fly if she had school records placing her in Manhattan just three months prior.

“I knew I should've graduated early.” Marlena fussed. “I could be in college in San Francisco or Houston right now.  _ Far  _ from here.” She rested her chin in her hand and looked lazily out the window as the car crept through the morning traffic. 

As they got closer to the building that Marlena had come to recognize all to well in her days of placement testing, the dread hit her all at once. The courtyard  of the school was full of kids running from their parents cars to friends they hadn't seen since the start of the summer. Even the younger looking freshmen were hanging around in groups. Marlena groaned when Natasha pulled into the drop-off line. 

“Oh come on Marlena, the day will be done before you know it.” Natasha said reassuringly.

“Easy for you to say. You two get to go back home.” 

“Ha! I wish we had a day off.” Clint laughed. 

“Wait you guys seriously have to go to work? Like at the office? I thought I was your job?” 

“We're your  _ guardians.” _ Nat clarified. “Cadets still need training, and honestly if I got paid to sit around all day I'd go insane.” 

“Probably miles better than prep school.” 

“Okay. There's only so much teenage brooding I can take in one morning.” Clint said. He hit the unlock button and turned around to open Marlena's door. 

“Oh my G-d.” Marlena sighed. 

“Have a nice day sweetie.” Natasha smiled. Clint flashed her a grin and gave a thumbs up. 

Marlena just rolled her eyes, grabbed her backpack and stepped out the car. “I'm not calling you mom and dad.” She said closing the door behind her. 

“See you at 3:15!” Clint shouted out his window. “Love ya!”

Marlena's back was to them as she walked away but she flipped the Bird anyway. Natasha honked the horn and drove off. 

“Nice.” A blonde boy said winking at her as she walked past. Marlena flipped him off too. 

She went past all the cliques of students and straight up the stairs to the doors of the school. Inside the entrance hall, things were a bit less crowded. Yuell wasn't a big school, only about 400 students total, but seeing the throngs of unfamiliar kids out front plus the few that had already started their way inside to find classes made Marlena think of the bustling tourist streets of Time Square. 

She took the class schedule that had come in the mail out if the pocket of her hoodie. Despite the fact that she had been coming back and forth to the school for testing, she had only been in the one classroom next to the principal's office. 

  
  


 

  1. __Homeroom/APUSH 8:15 to 9:15 - Ms. Cooper Rm 217__
  2. _AP Physics 9:18 to 10:30- Mr. Dillard Rm 134_
  3. _French 10:33 to 11:45- Mrs. Laurent Rm 202_
  4. _Lunch 11:48 to 12:18_
  5. _Old World Literature 12:21 to 1:35- Mr. Clarence Rm 116_
  6. _Dance Composition 1:38 to 2:38 -  Mrs. Tiller Rm 112_
  7. _Study Hall 2:41 to 3:15 - Library (check with homeroom teacher each morning as location for your grade and group may change)_



 

 

She had lucked out in her placement testing when she met the maximum scores for math and science. But also cursed herself because instead of having an individual class on each subject, she had to take the highest level of physics the school offered. Everything else was pretty much in line with the classes she had been taking back in New York, although the dance class was new. Natasha had suggested it, told her that she had done ballet when she was younger. Marlena had never taken a dance class before. It just wasn’t something she had ever been interested in, but the other electives the school offered weren’t up to Marlena’s interests. She couldn’t read music to save her life, never felt like much of a visual arts person, and while she loved a good musical, preferred to admire theater with her butt firmly in the audience.The only other option was gym, and for some reason, they only time slot that would be compatible with her schedule was gym as a first period class. So dance it was. 

Having the dance class made Marlena excited to some degree. Besides giving her something new to do and learn, it also gave Natasha something to talk to her about. The tension in the house started to ease as the rest of the summer passed on, especially after Marlena started her medication. 

The household had fallen into a fairly predictable pattern. Everyone in the house would be awake just after eight (although Marlena only adopted that habit not being able to sleep through the smells of whatever was being cooked for breakfast or the news playing on the television), whatever few chores needed to be done would be quickly finished, fussing about planning for the school year, whatever tending needed to be done in the garden, some local exploration if the weather permitted, and back home by eight. 

There had been three nights where Clint and Natasha had gone out, leaving Marlena home alone for an hour or two. The first two times they had returned with take-out. She had never questioned their outings as nothing more than two friendly co-workers, forced to play house, trying to make the best out of a peculiar situation. But one night in July, they had come home a little later than usual. Marlena had fallen asleep on the couch, but woke up when she heard the locks turning on the front door. She had been laying flat on her stomach and glanced up over the arm of the couch to see the pair standing in the doorway, Clint with an arm thrown across Natasha’s shoulders, stooped over trying to stifle his laughter. 

“Shh.” Natasha had tried to command, but she was giggling too. “She’s right there, she’s gonna hear you.” 

Marlena noticed a bottleneck sticking out of the plastic take out bag that Clint was carrying. She had neither seen either one of them drunk, and doubted that they had gotten sloshed that quickly on a trip out for Thai food. But whatever it was in the air between them, it was pretty infectious, because Marlena had found herself smiling too. But it was then, when Clint straightened up and was at height level with Natasha, he leaned in toward her face, but just as he was about to press his lips to hers, they both started laughing again. 

Dating had never been something that she thought of when she thought of the two of them together. They gave off the vibe of two friends that would go to the ends of the Earth for each other. Well, she guessed that would have made them more than friends then. Were they playing into the married couple role a little too well? Were they just trying to mess with her? She had lowered her head back onto the pillow she had been resting on and waited until she heard them go upstairs. When she figured the coast was clear, she tiptoed to her room. Upstairs, she could hear them chatting away in the master bedroom for about another hour before things quieted down. That night, she slept with her earbuds in, just in case. She wasn’t sure how thick the walls were, and didn’t want to risk finding out.

She found one of the staircases at the far end of the first floor, and went about locating room 217. The second floor was empty, save for the one teacher walking into their classroom on the other end. She walked down the hall, eyes darting from wall to wall looking for the right class number. When she found the right room, the door was already open. She poked her head inside and saw a short middle age white lady placing paper packets onto the desks. Marlena stepped into the doorframe and announced herself. 

“Is this Ms. Cooper’s class?” she asked cautiously. 

The woman jolted a bit at her voice, but nodded her head when she looked up and saw Marlena. “Yes. Hi, you must be the new girl. Lynn, right?” Ms. Cooper put down her papers and walked briskly to the door with her hand stretched out. 

“No, it’s Lysette. Lysette Ryan.” Marlena said flatly, shaking Ms. Cooper’s hand.

As apart of her cover, Marlena had to go by her middle name. She thought it was a little stupid, Lysette was a far less common name than Marlena. On the rare chance that someone was after her (Fury’s words of  _ Always expect more _ rang through her head more during the tail end of the summer as the school year had drawn closer), it would have been a hell of a lot easier to find someone named Lysette instead of just calling her Marley or Lena. 

But there was still the comfort in going by a familiar name. Teachers throughout her life had always told her that she had such a beautiful middle name, and it was a shame that she didn’t go by it more. 

“Oh, my mistake. Lysette, that’s not a name I’ve heard before. Were you named after anyone?” Ms. Cooper asked with an overly joyous bounce to her voice.

“No.” was Marlena’s answer. 

Ms. Cooper waited for her to ‘my parents just liked it a lot’ or ‘thank you’, but she didn’t. “Huh. Well, you’re a little early, but that’s okay. It’s your first day, I’m sure you must feel a little anxious,”  _ Got the 100mg prescription to prove it. _ Marlena thought. “But I don’t bite, so if you have any problems with anyone in this class, or any others, you just come talk to me about it okay?” 

Ms. Cooper was giving Marlena the impression of a woman whose attitude was far better suited for a younger,  _ much _ , younger audience, but had somehow gotten saddled with teaching uber smart teenagers instead. 

Marlena nodded. “Will do.” 

Ms. Cooper smiled sweetly. “Now you do have an assigned seat, and I think your’s should be,” she stepped back and wandered around the rows of desks for a moment,  “right, over, ah ha! Here.” she pointed to a desk in the middle of the third row of desks. Great. Alphabetical order. 

Marlena went to her seat and picked up the syllabus that Ms. Cooper had put on her desk. She flipped through it until the bell rang and students started to pool into the classroom. Just as she had seen outside, everybody seemed to know everybody already. Despite the assigned seating, students were grouping up at the desks of whichever friend they found first and chatting away. Marlena was in the center of it all, her solitude shining like a life beacon in the middle of an ocean. She tried to make herself disappear into the crowd, sinking down into her chair, keeping her eyes on her hands. But then, she heard Ms. Cooper call for everyone to take their seats, and the classroom bustled for a few seconds more before settling into order. 

Ms. Cooper went through the standard new year speech, saying hello to students she recognized from the year before, telling everyone how fortunate they were to have made it this far in such a prestigious school, and so on. Marlena thought she had almost made it scotch free of any possible ice breakers that Ms. Cooper might have prepared, but just as she was letting her cover down, she heard her teacher say, “Now class, I know a lot of you have been here all four years, but we have a new student here with us.” 

Marlena’s veil of invisibility fell in an instant. The shuffle of kids turning to look at her was deafening in her ears. “Everyone, give a warm welcome to Ly-what is it again sweetie?” 

“L-Lysette.” Marlena whispered, tugging at the hem of her skirt under the desk. 

“A little louder please.” 

“Lysette.” Marlena’s voice cracked on the second syllable. 

“Ah, yes. Everyone welcome Lysette all the way from,” she paused and made a waving gesture with her hand, waiting for Marlena to answer.

“Eugene. Oregon.” her words were clipped. She needed it to be 3:15 right the hell now. 

Ms. Cooper smiled, all teeth this time. “My, trekked all the way across the country, haven’t you? Is there anything interesting you would like to share with the class? Maybe something about your summer?” 

Her mouth felt dry. What the hell could she say? She had a memory bank full of stories to give up. She could tell the truth and stir up some crazy rumors for herself. “Uh, I uh, my mom met Iron Man. Once.”

“Oh! That’s cool!” Ms. Cooper exclaimed. “Do you know how?” 

“It was, a work thing. She does like, robotics...stuff.” Marlena struggled. 

“Well, if your she had anything to do with that attack in New York, tell her thank you for her service.” 

That almost got her to laugh. She bit down on her lip and nodded. She thought she was out of the woods, but Ms. Cooper had one more thing to add. “Oh, and by the way Lysette, you can’t wear that jacket. It’s against uniform policy.” 

Marlena gave her a nod, but waited for her to return her attention to the entire class before peeling out of the jacket and shoving it into her backpack. “Ah fuck.” she whispered as breathlessly as she could.

“Cool story.” the boy sitting next to her snickered when Ms. Cooper was in the middle of role call. “Did she meet him or just fuck him?”

Marlena didn’t even give him the satisfaction of a sideways glance, just kept her eyes ahead at Ms. Cooper’s agenda on the SmartBoard.

They went over the syllabus, and when class finally started, Marlena had zoned out. It was the same old drawl about early civilizations in North America that she had learned back in Brooklyn.  

One agonizingly slow hour later, the bell rang. Marlena waited until most of the other students left to get up and leave. As she walked the hallway to her next class, she remembered what she had said at her mom’s funeral about saying a name eight times to remember it forever. She was certain she would never need to think of the first two syllables of the school’s annoying long name for it to be etched into her memory. 


	6. Ghoul School

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No amount of personal drama ever compares to what teenage girls can dish out to each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> long chapter cause i'm going out of town the next 2-3 weekends and also wanna work on some original stuff for a while. this'll be back by june tho

Two weeks into the school year and Marlena had it set in her mind that she was going to have a rather lonely and frustrating senior year. After Ms. Cooper’s class, she made her way to physics, where her teacher, Mr. Dillard, went out of his way to single her out as the new kid. He however, wasn’t as sweet as Ms. Cooper had been. When he called her name on the role, he made a point of telling her, and her alone, how difficult this course was, and her placement scores were just show to him. Marlena had made a big show of rolling her eyes when she thought he wasn’t looking, but somehow he caught her and said, “Attitudes won’t be tolerated either.”

The dread and nervousness she had felt in homeroom was replaced with a flame in her chest that didn’t die until the bell rang. She made it a goal in her heart to make all A’s in that class for the entire year, just to spite him.  

French was the only time she caught a break in the day. Mrs. Laurent was her only teacher all day that didn’t go out of her way to treat Marlena as someone new, she gave her a welcome packet to go alongside her syllabus on the first day of class, but gave her the same level of attention that she gave the rest of the class. The only time she addressed her directly in any way that might have stood out was to tell her to come to her if she was having any kind of trouble at the end of class on the first day.

Lunch should have been easy, but of course, there was an added layer of stress to that as well. She had packed her lunch, which saved her the trouble of standing in line, but finding a place to sit that didn’t put her in the middle of someone else’s conversation was a time consuming effort. She eventually settled sitting on a bench outside next to the teacher’s table. On the first day, one of the teachers, some young looking man who couldn’t have been six years older than Marlena, had asked her if she would have felt more comfortable sitting with the students at the table a few feet in front of her. Marlena had protested of course, but the man, Mr. Dodson, he had told her told her to sit with them. It was a group of six girls, two of them sitting with the arms of two boys wrapped around their shoulders. They all looked up suddenly, their faces rather annoyed that their conversation had been disrupted by Mr. Dodson’s well meaning but poor attempt at trying to give Marlena some friends.

Mr. Dodson left them alone and went back to the teacher’s table, but as soon as he left, one of the boys, asked, “So, are you like, here on scholarship or something?” Marlena got up, went back inside the school, and ate her club sandwich outside the door of her next class.

She wanted to take out her phone and text Clint and Natasha, tell her how _wonderful_ of a day she was having so far, but didn’t want to risk getting a detention on her first day. The halls were empty much to her relief. The only person to walk by was a young looking boy, a freshman, but his head was too far into a map of the school to pay much attention to her.

Marlena had never been a popular person at any of her old schools, but she had always had a group of two or three friends that would make it to the end of each year with her. When she transferred to private school though, that number dwindled, especially as she started to create a name for herself as the black kid that always stayed in trouble. There was one girl though that she talked to a lot during her junior year. Talia was her name, they had a few classes together and were always sitting next to each other because both their last names started with D. The two of them never hung out outside of school, but Marlena had her number in case she ever had questions about homework or a project. There had been one time where Talia had invited her to a house party, but Marlena had to miss it as she was grounded for the disciplinary note her statistics teacher had sent home with her.

Had Talia survived the attack? Marlena hoped so. As much as she hated her old school school, she had never wished any harm on any of the people there. She made a note to look up her name on one of the memorial pages that were posted on New York news sites when she got home.

So far, this school seemed to offer no promises of someone like Talia crossing her path. She and Talia hadn’t been close, but she was a good enough friend that she could text in the middle of the night, whether it be for questions about homework, gossip about whatever was happening with the swim team, or just to talk about that week’s episode of Parks and Rec. Two weeks at Yuell, and all Marlena had to talk to was Mr. Dodson who would always manage to find her at lunch and say, “Gonna sit with other humans today?”

Marlena would always answer back, “Someday, not today.”

She knew that he was just trying to be optimistic, she had overheard from some kid in her physics class that he had been an intern in the engineering class last year and now had that position to himself since the teacher he had interned for had retired.

She sat outside of Mr. Clarence’s class for lunch for three days before a teacher finally caught her and sent her back to the cafeteria. So, for the last week and a half, Marlena took her seat at the bench by the teacher’s table, ate in silence, and headed to the rest of her classes without comment.

Old World Literature was a bore. There was no assigned seating, which Marlena was thankful for. She tucked herself away at the back of the class near one of the windows. It was next to the students that always chatted away during class, but Mr. Clarence was old and only ever focused on what the class was doing if someone laughed too loudly or had their head down to catch a nap. Marlena had taken to using the class to start on homework from her other classes so she wouldn’t have to worry about it when she got home.

Finally, her last class of the day was dance. She had been excited for it on the first day, but when she saw the athletic figures of the girls who had clearly been in lessons since they could walk, Marlena’s excitement quickly turned into grief. This was the beginner’s class, and yet the class of mostly freshmen girls still managed to run laps around her in warm ups. The only upside Marlena saw so far was that the class required very little speaking on her part. Her teacher, Mrs. Tiller, was another middle aged white woman, who ran a tight ship. No speaking unless spoken to and no goofing off. As soon as the stretches were finished with, it was an hour of run throughs and routine.

Another bonus of the class was how structured it was. Sure, Mrs. Tiller was a _little_ scary in how seriously she took things, but it kept Marlena focused. She was finally able to think on something other than how much her day was sucking, and after a full week, all of the experienced girls in the class looked as goofy and clueless as Marlena did as they tried to keep up with Mrs. Tiller’s rigid discipline.

Technically, Marlena’s study hall was another class. But after the first day of class, she quickly learned that that was just where juniors with too many credits to need another class, and seniors too smart for their own good, were herded into the library and adjacent computer labs at for the end of the day so they wouldn’t run amuck in the halls.

After sitting in the library for about fifteen minutes, Marlena got the gist of what exactly was going on, got up, and left. She didn’t have a plan, so she just wandered around the halls aimlessly. There were few teachers or students milling about as it was the end of the day, which made Marlena’s eventual routine for last period all that more easy.

On the first day, she had given up wandering and went to wait in the staircase closest to the front entrance so she could be the first out the door when the bell rang. But on the second day, she took a wrong turn coming out of the library and ended up in an unmarked stairwell mistaking it for the one that would take her back downstairs. At first she assumed that it was some third floor that she hadn’t been to, all of her classes were split between the first and second levels of the school. She decided to see where it went, but  quickly realized her ideas of a secret level were false when she saw how worn the steps were and coughed on the stuffy air when the door swung shut behind her.

When she reached the top and emerged on the roof, she panicked for a moment, thinking some alarm must have been going off to alert the staff below that someone was up there. But none did. How had this not been marked off? Had no other student found this or did the school trust its students enough to not dick around on the rooftop? Marlena looked around, she had come out on the back end of the roof, away from the entrance at the front, so she was in no danger of being caught up here by anyone down below. Out on the backlot of the school was a small parking lot for the teachers and the few juniors and seniors that had cars. Down below, there were two students, one boy and one girl, giggling as they ran across the parking lot and to one of the cars. They wouldn’t pay her any attention if they saw her, and if they did, Marlena had seen them ditching just like she was.

She walked back to wall where the door was and sat down. It was a nice day, and there was a bit of shade, which made her lounging all the more enjoyable. For the rest of the first week, Marlena would go there after spending a few minutes in study hall, just to sign in, before ditching and going up to the roof. She never did anything worth talking about, and if she did it wasn’t as if she had anyone to talk to about it. She mostly just did homework, listened to music, and scrolled through what few people she followed on Twitter.

Those thirty minutes on the roof always felt like an eternity, but in the best way possible. It was the only place in her new life where she could actually carve time out for herself. No teachers forcing her to prove her worth, no students throwing odd glances over their shoulders trying to figure her out, and no Avengers or grandfather checking in to make sure she wasn’t having another breakdown.

But of course, nothing ever lasts for long, especially nothing that good.

It was Wednesday of her third week of school. She had stopped going to the library to sign into study hall altogether. The librarian charged with watching her study hall group never checked the sign in sheet or called role after the first week was over. She made a stop by the bathroom next to the dance class before she headed up to the roof when she overheard a group of girls talking. She was in the last stall, those big ones meant for wheelchairs, Marlena always used them if she could. There was a sink in that stall, and she preferred to not have to bump elbows with anyone from her classes if she could avoid it.

“-yeah that’s the one. She’s quiet.” the door of the bathroom had opened letting in the last half of one girl’s sentence.

A second girl started speaking. “Pff. Quiet’s not the word. She’s fuckin' weird. I swear, I’ve never heard her say anything in class unless Mr. Dillard’s calling role.” Marlena knew her voice, it belonged to, Bryce? Brianna? No, Brielle. She sat two seats over from her in physics. Marlena had caught her staring at her a few times in the last couple of weeks, and they were never stares of admiration or wonder. Brielle must have constantly smelled something bad whenever she stared at her, because when Marlena would catch her looking at her, she always had her nose twisted up as she cut her eyes at her.

“Is she mute or something? Deaf?” the first girl asked.

“No. Brielle’s right, she’s just fuckin' weird.” a third girl cut in, “She’s in my literature class, and I swear to G-d all she does is stare out the window.” Another familiar voice, Macy. She sat in front of her in Old World Literature. Marlena seldom saw anything of her other than the back of her shiny black hair. She actually kinda liked listening to Macy talk in class. She was constantly volunteering to read passages from whatever book it was they were studying right now. But apparently, Macy had something against her, all because she didn’t talk enough for her liking.

“Where is she from anyway? She just dropped outta thin air.” Brielle asked.

“Oregon I think? Nate’s in Ms. Cooper’s class with her. He says he catches her staring at me sometimes in lit.” Macy said.

 _Fuck._ Marlena shut her eyes at that sentence. How the hell was she supposed to help the fact that Macy had the shiniest head of hair she had ever seen? Or an Audible Audiobooks quality voice? How could she not stare?

 _Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!_ Marlena mouthed silently.

“Oh Christ, I swear, if she’s anything like Kate I’m gonna barf.” Brielle laughed.

“Whatever. I told Nate that if he sees her staring again to just kick her ass or something. Shit’s weird. She’s in dance too? Probably gets turned on ju-” Macy’s sentence was cut off. Marlena had flushed the toilet and came out of the stall. She stood there staring at the three girls for a few seconds before she started walking slowly toward Macy.

She had dealt with girls like them before. They never ceased to fill Marlena’s stomach with a flurry of emotions; rage, shame, fear, anger at herself for being like this in the first place. Back in New York, she had dealt with the girl in her chemistry class by cursing her out once for good measure in the middle of class. It landed her in Saturday detention for three weeks, but she had nothing to say to or about Marlena from that point on. Marcy, Brielle, and their short brunette friend were sure to be the same. Marlena had tried to keep a low profile for the year, but clearly, that wasn’t going to work. She should have known that rumors and jokes would have started circulating one way or another, but she thought they would have just been stupid things about why she never spoke, or what her real story was. It was a pain in the ass that the first thing they had jumped to was lesbianism.

If it had been anything, _anything_ else, Marlena would have let it slide. But this was too personal for her to sit here and listen to it and not do anything. That, and she didn’t want to wait however long it would take for the three of them to be done, and G-d only knows what they would say about her then if she walked out after seemingly have eavesdropped on them for a couple of minutes in a bathroom.

Marlena scowled at them, taking slow steps until she was practically touching noses with Macy. “Next time you want to say something about me,” she said, her voice barely above a grumbling whisper, “make sure you look good enough to think I would even waste my time having a crush on you.” She shot glances at Brielle and the brunette too, before washing her hands, and walking out of the bathroom.

That afternoon, she skipped going to the roof altogether and went out the back entrance to the parking lot, where she put in her earbuds, and walked home. It took her about thirty minutes, and when she got home, Natasha was calling her. Marlena ignored the call and sent her a text instead.

 

 **Marley:** i walked home. sorry i forgot to tell you

 **Nat:** it’s fine. what’s wrong?

 

Marlena groaned and locked her phone. Of course now she was going to have to deal with Natasha and Clint this evening, great. There wouldn’t be any point in lying, they were spies after all. Even if she practiced from now until dinner, she’d never be able to come up with something convincing enough to fool them. The truth was the only possible way to go about this, but how would they even take that? Tell her to tough it out? It hadn’t even been a whole month into the school year, and it wasn’t as if Macy or Brielle had actually done anything to Marlena, they had just been talking. Well, there was the part where Macy said she would get her boyfriend to beat Marlena up if he caught her wandering eyes, but that was a different problem. Marlena was no Kung Lao, but she was sure she could take on some spoiled prep school boy pretty well.

She went upstairs to her room and changed out of her uniform. Ever since she had been enrolled to Yuell, her closet was nothing but white button ups, khaki and blue skirts, and khaki pants. Marlena would always be glad to get out of her school clothes and into sweats and a t-shirt in the evenings and on weekends.

Ten minutes later, Marlena heard the door open as Natasha came in. “Marlena, I’m home.” Natasha announced.

“I’m up here.” Marlena called back. She was at her desk doing homework that she normally would have had a headstart on if she had been on the roof instead of in the bathroom. G-d, she really had to pick _then_ to take a leak.

Natasha knocked on the doorframe when she got upstairs. “Hey, you alright?”

“Wouldn’t have walked half an hour home by myself unless I wasn’t.” Marlena said.

“Hm. Wanna talk about it or?”

Ever since her mother’s funeral, Clint and Natasha had backed off a little bit. They were still keeping a watchful eye on her, making sure she kept up with her medication, paid attention for any shifts in her mood, but they hadn’t tried so hard to get her to act like any normal teen would around their parents, foster or otherwise. Marlena appreciated it, she enjoyed being able to open up on her own terms, made her relationship with them feel a lot less artificial. Their new approach made it easier for her to talk to them. They still didn’t know everything about her, but at least now they knew what to order for her whenever they called in take-out, and to not wake up when they heard her get up a few times in the night to get water downstairs or to pace around mindlessly after a nightmare.

Marlena sighed. She knew that Natasha had most definitely told Clint already. Although that was nothing personal. It was their job to be aware of her wellbeing 24/7, just another part of the job. Clint wasn’t as easily deterred as Natasha. It had taken him a few days after the funeral to get the gist of what was going on between she and Natasha before he stopped pushing her so hard to interact. Of the two of them, Clint was the more parental. He was the constantly hovering sitcom dad whereas Natasha was the aunt who would drop in only when she felt something was wrong. It was an interesting dynamic to see them try to work Marlena out, but right now, they were in a good groove.

“I’ll be okay. Just some kids at school.” Marlena said at last.

“Are you sure?” Natasha asked.

Marlena nodded. “I was just trying to avoid a fight. Nothing I can’t handle by myself.”

It wasn’t a complete lie. Marlena was certain that if she had stayed in that bathroom for five seconds longer, she would have turned around and punched all three of them.

Natasha opened her mouth to say something, but remembered their silent agreed upon deal; Marlena would come to her when she needed to, not when Natasha wanted her to.

“Okay. Well, I’m making lasagna for dinner. You wanna come down and help when you’re done with your homework?”

Marlena shrugged. “If astrophysics doesn’t kill me, then sure.”

Natasha didn’t say anything else.

* * *

 

The next week of school was easily the most aggravating in Marlena’s life. When she was faced with bullies back in New York, she could deal with them in no time. There wasn’t an air of secrecy to keep up. She could curse people out, and even beat them up if she needed to get them off her back. But now, well now she couldn’t even say a word about what state she was really from or even go by her first name.

The day after their confrontation in the bathroom, one of the girls had reported Marlena to a guidance counselor. When she was in Ms. Cooper’s class the next morning, Marlena was called down to the office, where she had to explain over the phone to Natasha what had happened. At least the counselor, Mr. Kirkley, had been nice enough to let Marlena pick who she wanted to call. She was glad that she could avoid Clint’s fatherly concern for now. Natasha hadn’t been angry when Marlena was done explaining, just simply said, “We’ll discuss it this evening.” and assured Mr. Kirkley that there didn’t need to be a conference made.

When the call was over, Mr. Kirkley leaned back and said, “Ms. Ryan, you really should watch how you carry yourself around here. It’s only three weeks into the year, and you’ve got promising grades. I’d hate for that to get flushed down the toilet all because of some silly girl talk.”

Marlena had to fight the urge to correct him on everything he had just said. It was DuMont, well, Fury, whatever, but it wasn’t Ryan, the surname that had been picked out for her alias. She had no reason to watch how she carried herself, because until Brielle and Macy decided that they had a problem with her, Marlena had no way of “carrying herself” aside from making sure she was out of the way. Girl talk? Fuck that. If this had been nothing more than some silly girl talk, Marlena wouldn’t have spent the night before angry at herself for being a big fucking lesbo.

But she didn’t say any of that. She nodded her head, said, “I’ll try my hardest.” and went back to class. When she got back into Ms. Cooper’s class, she scanned the class for Nate, the boy Macy had mentioned yesterday in the bathroom. He was in the same row as Marlena waas, but a few seats over. Dusty blond, big head, eyes too small for aforementioned head. He was just another variation on every boy she had wanted to kick through a wall since sixth grade.

Marlena’s gaze was unassuming when she saw him, while he was snickering and tapping one of his friend’s on the shoulder to look at her as she walked back into class. Now Marlena was quietly hoping he would try to beat her up so she could wipe the floor with his ugly mug.

The rest of the day, and the next week, were a pain to get through. Marlena had a class with either Macy or Brielle every other period except for French and dance. If she didn’t have a class with them, it was one of their friends. She didn’t know any of them by name, but she knew from the way they all snickered and sneered at her when she walked past that word of the bathroom encounter had spread quick. Marlena tried to not give them the satisfaction of another reaction, but the next Tuesday in French, she heard someone giggling behind her.

“No, you ask her. She’s fuckin’ scary.” the girl said, barely covering the laugh in her voice.

“Ugh, _fine_.” a boy said. He tapped on her shoulder, and Marlena turned around.

“What?” she asked flatly.

“Hey, uh, don’t take this personally, but did you finger Brenda in the bathroom?” he could barely get through the sentence without laughing.

Marlena didn’t even know anyone named Brenda. She wanted to slap him and the girl sitting next to him. But what would that get her? Another call to the office, another awkward chat with Natasha and Clint that evening?

The evening of the counselor call, Natasha had picked her up from school. She told her that she hadn’t talked to Clint yet, just wanted to get Marlena by herself before making mountains out of mole hills. Marlena hadn’t said much, just that it was three girls who wanted to start a scene, and Marlena had told them to fuck off. Again, not a lie, but Natasha told Marlena to ignore them and talk to a teacher the next time it happened. Well now it was the next time, but it wasn’t just Macy and Brielle anymore. It seemed the entire school had found out, and were going out of their way to make up their own stories about Marlena to run along to their friend groups.

“I don’t know who that is.” Marlena said, trying to keep the heat out of her voice, but her fists were balled, ready to strike should the boy or his friend have anything to add.

“Really?” the boy said, shit eating grin still on his face, “Cause Nate says you two got to know each other _pretty_ _well_.”

Marlena shot upward out of her chair, knocking her desk backward as she did so. The boy and the rest of the class looked shocked at her sudden movement. She stood there, glaring down at him, fists ready at her sides. Looking down now, he looked so small, the grin on his face wiped away in an instant.

“Miss Ryan.” Mrs. Laurent said at the front of the class. “Is everything okay?” Marlena didn’t respond. “Lysette.” she said demandingly, “Please sit down, or step into the hallway.”

Marlena’s heart beat like thunder in her chest, she wanted to punch this brat square in his nose. Wanted to show him and the rest of the class that she was not one to fuck with. Maybe Fury was a fitting name for her after all.

Instead, she slammed her fist down on the boy’s desk, picked up her backpack, and went into the hall. Mrs. Laurent was out the door shortly after, but Marlena was already down the hall. The teacher jogged after her, and ordered her to wait in an empty neighboring classroom with the Spanish teacher until class was over. When the bell rang, Mrs. Laurent came inside and asked her to explain what was going on.

“Nothing.” Marlena said, avoiding Mrs. Laurent’s gaze.

“That didn’t look like nothing to me.” she said, her voice stern. “Lysette, I don’t want to call your parents. You’re a very well behaved girl, and you’re one of my best students. I don’t know what is going on between you and Bradley,” G-d, that kid’s name would be _Bradley._ Even his parents knew he was gonna grow up to be a dick, “but whatever it is, I advise you to take it to the guidance counselor’s office now rather than later.”

But it was later, and Marlena knew that situations like these would be consisting of nothing but ‘later’. It didn’t matter who she went to, parents, teachers, counselors, even the principal, if none of the kids laid a hand on her, it wouldn’t get resolved. And even if they did touch her, all the aggressor would have to do is lie and say Marlena had started it, because who would believe the suspiciously quiet black girl that no one knew anything about? She was a blank slate to the entire school, and they could throw whatever attributes and personalities at her that they wanted. To Mrs. Laurent, she was the quiet girl who worked poorly in groups and class participation, but excelled on paper. To students, she was the weirdo from Eugene, Oregon, who fucked girls in the bathroom when she thought nobody was looking.

But she wasn’t any of those things. She was Marlena. Marlena the girl from New York who really loved gyros and dumplings. Marlena, the ace student, Marlena the newfound dance lover, the orphan, the _Last Airbender_ fan, the gardener. Marlena DuMont. Marlena Lysette DuMont. Marlena Lysette Fury. But they didn’t know that, and never would.

“I can deal with it myself.” Marlena said biting the inside of her cheek. She felt like crying and was angry about it. She hadn’t cried since her mother’s funeral, and was trying to keep it that way. Brielle and Macy had no right to give her the same reactions that her dead mother did. It wasn’t fair, but it’s what she did. Tears rolled down her cheek as she sat, still looking away from Mrs. Laurent.

“Oh darling,” Mrs. Laurent knelt down to Marlena’s eye level. Marlena looked at her. Mrs. Laurent was a pretty lady. Pale skin like Natasha’s, dark brown curls framing her face, round face, and beautiful green eyes. Marlena felt like now wasn’t the time to open up the possibility of a teacher crush, but it budded anyway. Those looks paired with the soft, sweet tone she had taken up? Marlena was a goner.  “Do you want to call your parents? I’ll tell them you weren’t feeling well. This can be just between us.”

Marlena shook her head. She wanted to show those kids that she was better than them, that she could handle whatever they threw at her. But could she? She was crying in front of her French teacher and feeling like a complete idiot for it. Regardless, Mrs. Laurent nodded her understanding, and got up. She pulled a mint out of her pocket and handed it to Marlena.

“I know it probably won’t help, but I just want you to know that you can trust me. You don’t have to do this alone.”

Marlena looked up into her eyes. G-d, that crush wasn’t about to go anywhere soon. “Thank you.” she said. She got up and went to lunch.

* * *

 

Dance had been getting easier as the days went by. Right now, they were working on a routine for the winter showcase coming up in December. It was some modern piece that Marlena had taken to practicing in her room or the living room at night whenever she would wake up from a nightmare. The repeated movements, turns, and discipline that went into her practices were meditation for her. The few times that Natasha had caught her in the middle of the night, she had offered her help, and Marlena gladly took it.

“I used to do ballet when I was younger.” Natasha had told her one night when they were practicing.

“I could’ve guessed that. You’ve got the legs for it.” Marlena had laughed.

Thankfully, the dance room was the one place Marlena seemed to be immune from the school’s rumors. Mrs. Tiller ran a tight ship, and any whispering among students was quickly caught and reprimanded. Today was no exception, and Marlena tried to bask in the rigidity of the class, but after her encounter at lunch, it was hard to focus.

As expected, word of her outburst in French spread quickly through the gossip chain. A couple of the groups she passed banged their fists on the table. Marlena was pissed at herself for acting out in French, but walked to her usual spot by the teacher’s table without a word.

But when she got to her bench, there was someone sitting there, Nate.

“Can you move please?” Marlena asked.

“Oh, so it does speak.” Nate asked, standing up and taking a step toward her.

She looked over to the teacher’s table. Mr. Dodson and the usual group of teachers were there, but weren’t paying much attention. Marlena rarely said anything at lunch, so they had probably started to drown out whatever activity went on at the bench.

“Dude. I just wanna eat my lunch.” Marlena said.

“Okay. Well can I talk to you first.” he took another step forward.

“You can say it from right where you are.”

Nate chuckled. “Scared?”

 _I’m a New Yorker,_ she thought, _fear is my life._

“No. I have perfectly fine hearing. You can talk from there.”

Nate rolled his eyes. “Whatever.” he stepped forward anyway, the same distance from her face that she had been to Macy last week. “Stay the fuck away from my girlfriend or else I’ll set you straight.”

He glanced up and down her body before pushing past her and walking away.

She had wanted to say something, telling him to tell Macy to face her herself if she had that big of a problem with Marlena. But she didn’t. She sat down, her appetite gone, she popped the mint Mrs. Laurent had given her and sat in silence.

Now in dance class, she couldn’t stop staring at herself in the mirrors lining the walls. What the fuck had Nate been looking at? And what for? Marlena wasn’t an out of shape girl, especially now after weeks of dance. She was taller than most girls her age, and knew that she could beat the shit out of Nate if it came down to that. But she knew what he had meant and what he was looking at. She knew it too well after years of various boys making the same slick comments when they felt her gaze had wandered to their girlfriends for two seconds too long.

Maybe she did need to get Clint and Natasha involved. This was very clearly going to go past the point of no return quickly. But that would only be a temporary fix. She gets Nate in trouble and then what? His friends come after her? It felt hopeless, but Marlena refused to crack. She needed to handle this herself, she had done it by herself for years, and could do it for one more. Fuck Nate, fuck Brielle, and fuck Macy.

When her classes were done for the day, Marlena actually sat through study hall that day. She knew going up to the roof would level her out, and that was the exact opposite of what she wanted. She needed every ounce of courage and rage building in her for that last half hour of the day. When the bell rang, she was out the door in a flash and into the courtyard. Macy must have had a class on the first floor, because Marlena saw heading for the front door when she stepped off the staircase.

She pushed past every student standing in her way, not bothering to apologize. Outside, Macy was standing at the base of the steps, her back was turned to the front door, and she didn’t see Marlena marching toward her. When she reached her, Marlena shoved her hard, knocking Macy into Brielle who was standing beside her.

“If your boyfriend ever, _ever_ puts a hand on me,” Marlena fumed, “you better kiss his ass goodbye, because I will break his _fucking_ neck!”

“What the fu-” Macy started, but Marlena kept going, she was on fire.

“And what the fuck did I ever do to you? Not talk enough? Look at the back of your head? You sit right the fuck in front of me, what the fuck else am I supposed to look at? Would you prefer if I look right down your pussy? No, cause then I’d just be looking at your whole face you musty _cunt_!” she stepped to Macy, one foot on her’s, stepping down hard, “Do not. Fuck with. Me.”

Marlena whipped around and walked away. She felt her phone vibrating in her pocket, but knew it was Clint without taking it out. She saw his car in the carpool lane, and from where he was parked, he saw everything. Great. Marlena picked up her pace, wanting to be within the confines of the car so she could scream every swear she knew, and maybe put her hand through the windshield for good measure.

Macy's hands were on her before Marlena could fast walk the rest of the distance to the car. Marlena held her hands out as she fell to the ground, but her chin still slammed against the sidewalk, her teeth chomped down on her tongue, and blood flooded her mouth immediately.

“Stay the _fuck_ away from me!” Macy screamed at her.

Every fiber in her body was telling her to leave it be. To get in the car and swallow her pride, and she almost did. But just as she was back on her feet, seeing Clint stepping out of the car, she heard it, “Fucking dyke.”

Marlena lost it. She took her backpack off her shoulders, turned around, and launched it, aiming for Macy's head. It hit her square in her chest, knocking her back a few steps. Marlena ran at her screaming. When they collided, Marlena tackled her to the ground, but Macy was using her backpack as a shield against Marlena's blows. Marlena snatched it out of the way and went to work, punching her in her face several times before someone managed to get a grip on her shoulders and pull her back. But she wasn't ready to quit. She held onto Macy's shirt as was pulled off of her, bringing her off the ground a few inches before she leaned into her face and said, “I told you not to fuck with me.” And slamming her into the ground.

She swatted the hand of the person trying to hold her back off her shoulder, gave Macy one last kick in her stomach, grabbing her backpack, and turning to go to the car. When she turned around though, she saw that the person that had been holding her back was Clint.

“Get inside.” He said sternly. Marlena didn't say anything. She tried to pushed past him, but he grabbed her arm.

“Let me go Clint.” she said, her voice loud enough for any bystanders to hear her clearly.   
“Don’t you dare.”

Marlena met his steely gray eyes with her own fervor. It was a slim shot that anybody around them would even begin to think that Clint was a Shield agent, let alone an entire Avenger. But Marlena knew openly defying their cover in public was something that they wouldn’t be able to handle right then and there. She was diverting the situation in her favor.

“Let. Me. Go.” she said again.

Clint let go of her arm, his expression unchanged. “Get inside.” he pointed toward the school’s entrance, where an administrator was already jogging out toward them. Marlena threw her head back and yelled before stepping hard back up the stairs she had just come off of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can you tell i just got done reading 'the miseducation of cameron post'?


	7. Awkward Encounters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i lost my momentum writing this and deadass had to binge like half the mcu to get excited about writing this again. probably not gonna take another long break like that again unless something really major happens and i lose all my free time, cause i REALLY wanna finish this by the fall. i have sooo much planned to post this year. probably won't get like 2+ updates in a week like before but imma try to get like, two or three chapters out a month from now on.

Three weeks suspension for Marlena, and a broken nose, a few busted teeth, and black eye worthy of a  _ Mortal Kombat  _ fatality compilation for Macy. Even when she had cursed out a substitute teacher in her junior year, that had only gotten her three days, which considering that she got suspended on a Wednesday, really just gave her a long weekend. But three weeks suspension only a month and a half into the year? Marlena wouldn’t lie and say she wasn’t impressed. It didn’t come without a lot of haggling though. Clint and Natasha had done everything but get down on their knees and beg Principal Cummings to not expel Marlena. 

They also had to pay for Macy’s medical bills, because of course, Macy’s parents were the type of people that threatened to sue over anything. Marlena didn’t think pride was the best word to describe the swelling feeling that filled her chest when they told her, but that’s what it felt closest to. She had spent half the summer begging to not go to private school, told Natasha and Clint that she would be miserable, and look where they were now. Marlena had done everything to stay out of the way at school. Crossed every t, dotted every i, turned in assignments on time, and even brought in a fresh box of tissues for Ms. Cooper’s class when they ran out. She had been every bit the good quiet student that she needed to be, and still, managed to get bullied for something. But she had proved her point in the end, even if in the absolute worst way possible. 

She still got the short end of the stick in the sense that she would have to go back to Yuell in November, but maybe then the haze of amazement that Marlena had beat Macy to a pulp would settle, or they would learn from it and leave her the hell alone when she went back to class. But her poorly proven point aside, when the dust settled and Marlena was home the next week, the reality of what had really happened began to sink in. 

It felt like she had ran an entire mile backward in her healing and adjusting, physically and emotionally. Her tongue had bled profusely, and she ended up having to go to the hospital where she got stitches and found out that one of her teeth had been badly chipped. Her only other injuries were her bruised and swollen knuckles from where she had punched Macy. Walking around with bandages on her hands and gauze in her mouth the first two days of her suspension, Marlena felt rather useless. Natasha had been the one watching her those first few days. Despite the fact that they were both full-time Shield employees, Marlena wasn’t allowed to be by herself during a full eight hour day. Clint had been beyond angry with Marlena about the fight, he understood her reasoning for doing it, but considering he had seen the entire thing and saw just how badly she had beat Macy, he was a little more than disappointed in her. Marlena hoped that Natasha could have spent the entire first week with her, but she and Clint had already decided that they would be switching out what days they had to watch Marlena. 

The night after the fight, Marlena had stormed up to her room and slammed the door, but Clint just followed her upstairs, shouting at how ridiculously immature she was being. 

“Oh will you fuck off! You’re not my dad!” Marlena had shouted. She knew she was only feeding into his accusations of her being immature, but she didn’t care. 

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation, if you hadn’t beat that girl senseless! Over some stupid shit! Why didn’t you tell us?” Clint had shouted on the other side of the door. 

“ _ Stupid shit _ ? That bitch’s boyfriend was threatening to ‘set me straight’, what the hell else was I supposed to do!”

“Tell somebody! You don’t have to go through everything alone you know? You’re not in New York anymore.” 

“Well I still would be in New York, and avoiding all of this, if you guys hadn’t blown the fucking city to kingdom come!” Her voice and body had been shaking with rage. She knew that last sentence was harsh and extremely misdirected, but it was how she felt. 

“That’s enough you two!” Natasha shouted downstairs. Marlena had half the urge to shout ‘he started it’ back to her. “Marlena, come here, your grandfather’s on the phone.” 

In the weeks following the funeral, Marlena had gradually grown more comfortable with calling Fury her grandfather, but only in her head. He was rarely brought up around the house, and the few times he was, Marlena, Clint, and Natasha always called him Fury. Not Nicholas, not Nick, Fury. Hearing Natasha say ‘grandfather’ felt like a bastardization of his reputation and extremely out of place for the tense mood pulsing through the three of them. 

“No.” was all Marlena had replied. 

“Marlena,” Natasha called again, her voice harsher this time. 

“I said no!” she picked up one of her textbooks and tried to throw it at the door but with her bandaged hands, it fumbled in mid air and landed on the floor with a thud. “Fuck!” Marlena shouted, as if the book was the new target of her anger. 

The doorknob ratted and Natasha was knocking on the other side. “I'm not going to ask you again.” 

“You were asking the first two times?” 

“Marlena can you  _ please  _ just open the door.” 

Marlena huffed out a sigh. She knew she was being immature, but after having to deal with Clint's overbearing attitude the entire evening, Marlena's patience for whatever they or Fury had to say to her was paper thin. But she knew that keeping them on the other side of the door and her anger mistakenly aimed at them would get her nowhere. She opened the door, took the phone out of Natasha's outstretched hand and closed it back .

“Hello?”

“Sounds like you had a good day at school.” Fury said on the other end. If that was his attempt at sarcasm, it was a poor one. He sounded bored almost, no, fed up. Fed up of a something he hadn’t even been around to witness.

Marlena rolled her eyes. “Can you tell Clint to fuck off.”

“Can you stop cursing at me? And my agents? We're still adults.” 

“Jesus, fine. Can you tell Clint to leave me alone.”

“No.”

“Are you calling to tell me how disappointed you are?” 

“No.” 

“Are you going to say something other than no?” 

“Yes.”

Marlena rolled her eyes again, feeling the strain in the back of her head from how hard she was doing it. “What do you want? _ ” _ she asked through groan.

“Maybe a more honest explanation than Natasha gave me.” he said. 

“Some bit- _ girl _ at school has been getting her friends to bother me, so I handled it.” 

“I’m not going to ask again.” Fury said, that fed up tone rising in his voice again. 

Marlena clenched her jaw. She was feeling that same heat in her chest that she had when she first arrived in DC. Fury was trying to step in and play parent when he had pushed her onto someone else. What kind of explanation did she owe him other than the quickest and most effective way to kiss her ass? 

“Fine. You want honest, here it is,” Marlena was fuming. “I almost got hate crimed at school because some conservative Baptist chick couldn’t handle the fact that a dyke sat behind her in English class! Is that honest enough for you?” 

The commotion outside her door and Fury on the phone went quiet. Marlena couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she hung up the phone and pushed it under the door. 

“I’m going to bed.” was all she had left to say. 

* * *

 

Much like her last suspension, Marlena had been suspended on a Wednesday. But the long weekend she had gotten last time was shaping up to be more of a recipe for cabin fever by the start of the first full week of her suspension. The weekend had been uneventful, seeing as Clint had unofficially grounded her, or to be more accurate, Marlena had holed herself up in her room, only coming out for food and a bathroom break. She had finished her homework in the middle of the night on Thursday, and spent that Friday and the weekend bored out of her mind, but she didn’t dare ask for sympathy from Clint or Natasha. 

When Monday rolled around and Natasha went to work, it was just she and Clint. Marlena knew that she wouldn’t be able to spend all three weeks of her suspension holed up in her room, so she made her way downstairs and tried to spend more than five minutes in the kitchen for breakfast. 

“Ah, she’s awake.” Clint said when he saw her. 

“Unfortunately.” Marlena grumbled. 

“She speaks too!” 

_ Ah, so it does speak. _ Nate’s words from the week before rang in her head. His eyes up and down her body, his hot breath against her face as he threatened her. 

Marlena shook the thought out of her head. “Please, be quiet.” She said, more politely than she had said anything in the past few days. 

Clint sat and watched her with a concerned look as she made toast and scrambled some eggs. When she sat down on a stool and started eating, he finally spoke up, “Everything okay?” 

She shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, just sucks being stuck here.” 

“Here as in suspension or here as in everything in general.” 

Marlena pondered on that for a moment. If she could trade everything to get her mom and life in New York back, she would in a heartbeat. But then that would mean going back to a life of secrets, a life of not knowing who her parents had been, and still would have left her counting down the days until graduation when she could go to college and give a Big Bird to everyone that had made her high school years so miserable. This suspension sucked, but would it have really made a difference if she was suspended in DC or New York? She was starting to think that it wouldn’t. All that had changed now was that she lived with two strangers in a different city and had a distant relative watching over her. Now that she was thinking about it, life in DC hadn’t been all that different from what it had been just four months earlier. 

“Suspension.” Marlena settled. 

Clint sighed. “You know, I heard what you said to Fury the other night on the phone. About almost getting ‘hate crimed’. You still haven’t really told any of us what you beat that girl up for.” 

“I don’t want to.” 

“And I wasn’t going to ask.” 

That got her attention. She looked up from her food and met eyes with Clint. “I just-well first of all, I’m sorry for snapping at you the way I did the other night. I was just disappointed in you s’all.” 

Marlena wanted to say something witty about his cover as a parent rubbing off on him, but she didn’t. It felt too out of place for the mood between them. 

“I wasn’t expecting things to boil over so badly with you, and I will admit that’s a mistake on my, well, our part. I guess we both thought you not saying anything about school meant it was going okay for you.” 

“Clint, you don’t have to be so fatherly you know.” Marlena finally said. “I grew up without one, it’s fine.” 

“Yeah well I’m an orphan raised in a circus, and now I’m a superhero.” he said, “I’m not trying to be your dad. I just want you to know that I’m here for you. You shouldn’t feel like you have to do this alone just because you were doing it alone before. Trust me, I’ve been down that road with Nat time and time again, you can talk to me.” 

Marlena didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded her head and finished her food in silence. The entire summer she had been trying to avoid Clint and Natasha’s sympathy. She didn’t want it and didn’t think they had any reason to give it to her, but here was Clint, giving it willingly and eagerly and with a perfectly good reason. Marlena didn’t know if she wanted to take it or what. The fact that she was thinking about it as something to be traded like Pokemon cards at a lunch table made her feel a little guilty. 

“Thanks.” Marlena said quietly when she got up to put her dish in the sink. 

“You’re welcome.” Clint said. 

_ Now what?  _ The elephant in the room was gone now, she didn’t have any real reason to lock herself in her room other than her own stubbornness and self loathing. She looked out to the garden in the backyard. It had blossomed nicely in the summer months, but now in the cooling days of September, she was sad knowing the bloom would end soon. 

“I’ll be in the backyard if you need me.” Marlena said. 

“Alright Captain Planet.” 

The rest of the day went by with ease. After clearing the tension with Clint, and then Natasha when she got home that evening, things more or less fell into the pace that they had been before her suspension. There was still Fury to deal with, but Marlena didn’t want to think about him. Thinking about talking to him made her think about what talking to her father might have been like if he was alive. 

That was how she had to think about him in the days since the funeral to keep herself from getting back to that place of loathing toward him that she had had when she first arrived. Her mother wanted Fury to keep her safe, it was her dying wish, he was just obligating that. But she still felt a little bad that she had blown him off the other day when he had called. Although Marlena did think that his tone had helped her mood at all. 

The next day, she decided to bite the bullet and give Fury a call, which was when she realized that she didn't even have his phone number.

“Can I use your phone?” She asked Natasha the next afternoon.

“Sure. Something up with your’s?” Natasha asked handing Marlena her’s. 

“No I just don’t have Fury’s phone number.” 

Natasha looked up from, well Marlena couldn’t tell exactly what she was doing. She was sitting in the living room with her laptop, typing away at something that looked like an encryption code. If Shield was letting their agents work on hacking in the middle of their living rooms on old Dell laptops, Marlena was really going to start questioning the state of national security. 

“Really? I thought one of us would have given it to you by now.” she said.

Marlena shook her head. “No, I just wanna talk to him about the other night. I feel bad for talking to you guys but not him.” 

Natasha paused for a moment before she said anything else. “Do you want to see him?”

It had been over two months since Marlena had seen Fury. She hadn’t really questioned it until Natasha asked. Marlena knew that Fury was busy running a government agency, and was probably just as stunted as to what to do about his relationship with Marlena as she was with him. It didn’t bother her that she hadn’t seen him since her mom’s funeral. Besides, she had been so preoccupied that she hadn’t even stopped to think about Fury. Marlena wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him, but she had given Clint and Natasha the face-to-face apology talk that they deserved, it would be wrong to keep Fury out of that just because it felt like an inconvenience. 

“Sure,” Marlena answered. 

Natasha gave her a smile. “I’ll let him know.” 

“I can do it myself.” 

When she had talked to Fury that day in the garden, that had been arranged by her guardians. There wasn’t any reason for her to keep going through the two of them to talk to Fury just because he was their employer. She was family, as weird as it felt to say that, she should be able to talk to him herself, especially after so much time here in DC and the situation that brought her to ask for another meeting with him. 

“Just give me his number. I’ll call him.” Marlena said. 

Natasha passed her her cell phone, and Marlena scrolled through the contacts until she found Fury’s name. Her finger hovered over the call button before she finally pressed it and put the phone to her ear. Natasha took her laptop and left the living room to give her some privacy, which made Marlena feel a bit better. Since she no longer had her corner of the roof to escape to at the end of the day, Marlena felt like she was living under a microscope. It wasn’t much, giving her a few minutes to herself for an awkward phone call, but she appreciated it nonetheless. 

“Natasha,” Fury said when he answered, “Barton can’t be giving you that much trouble right now he’s at work.” 

“Uh,” Marlena said awkwardly. Was her hunch about Natasha and Clint being more than co-workers right or was this just banter? “It’s me.” 

“Oh, sorry. Marlena, how’re you doing?” he asked.

For a moment, she forgot what she had originally called to ask him, too preoccupied with the questions buzzing in her head about Clint and Natasha. Maybe if this went over well and she could see Fury in person soon, she could ask him then, he’d probably come off of that more easily than he would about whatever had gotten her father killed. 

“I just, I wanted call because, I want to talk to you about what I said the other night when I got suspended.” Marlena said. 

“Okay.” was all Fury said. 

Marlena took a breath in, trying to think about what she wanted to say next. Maybe it would have just been easier to say this over the phone. What point was there in waiting G-d knows how many days for him to be free so she could apologize in person? She knew she would lose the courage and the words. 

“I’m just, I’m sorry, about how I spoke to you. I was just angry, it’s nothing personal. But uh,” But what?  _ But I’m sorry for not giving you the details of how I thought I was gonna get jumped by a bunch of racist homophobes?  _ “Yeah I’m just. Sorry.” 

She knew that she wasn’t going to have the words to speak to him in person, which felt stupid considering she had spoken to him about nothing but dead family members each time she had seen him. Why was trying to explain a fight so hard? But Marlena knew why, it was her own pride. Clint had done most of the talking the other day, and when she spoke to Natasha that same evening, she had kept it short, telling her that she had just been angry. But she didn’t apologize for what she had done at school, she’d never be able to. Macy had it coming to her the moment Nate stepped to her. It was pride that kept her from telling everyone the gritty details of why she had done what she did, because she knew she would never be able to apologize for it. All she was sorry for was wasting her breath and energy yelling at them to fuck off. 

“Apology accepted.” Fury said, although there wasn’t much understanding in his voice, but it wasn’t that fed up tone he had with her the other night. “Was that all you called to talk about?”

“Yeah.” Marlena said. She knew she wasn’t going to be able to scrounge up more words to say to him in person. “Talk to you whenever, I guess.” 

“You should call more often y’know.” Fury said. She hated how casual that sounded. It felt like something someone would say to a friend or co-worker they had fallen out of touch with, not an estranged family member who was thrust upon you after a tragedy. 

“I’ll try. I’m pretty free until November.” Marlena said, trying to put some pep into her voice. 

“I look forward to that.” 

“Okay, bye.” 

She hung up the phone without giving him time to say something else. 

In the following days, Marlena’s schedule fell into the same maddeningly boring steps. Wake up, eat breakfast, garden for a bit if it wasn’t too chilly outside, and back inside to do whatever chores she had. But in the middle of her second full week of suspension, her schedule was shaken up that afternoon. 

She was on the couch in the living room, flipping through the giant dvd case Clint had given her so she could pick something to watch when the doorbell rang. 

“Did you order food?” Clint asked from the kitchen where he was starting dinner.

“Yeah because the thought of eating your stroganoff is a fate worse than death.” Marlena joked from the couch. 

Clint flicked a pasta noodle at her. “Get the door.” 

“What if it’s someone here to kill me.” 

“Marlena get the door.”

“You’re my legal guardian after all.” 

The doorbell rang again. 

“Just get the door.” 

Marlena laughed again and got up to open the door. On the other side was a girl who looked to be her age, she was wearing a Yuell uniform and carrying a tote bag with some books and paper along with her own backpack slung over her shoulders. 

“Uh...can I help you?” Marlena asked. 

“I’m Kate, Kate Bishop. You’re Lysette Ryan, right?” 

Marlena nodded her head. Kate stuck out her hand. “I’m your tutor while you’re out of school.” Kate said. 

“Cl-Dad!” Marlena shouted over her shoulder. Since she was suspended, she hadn’t had to think much on the cover she had been keeping up at Yuell, and never had to refer to Clint or Natasha as her parents aside from a few passing questions from teachers. Saying it aloud now felt weird.

Clint appeared in the doorway beside her. “Hello?” 

“Kate Bishop,” she said again and held her hand out to Clint. “I’m your daughter's tutor since she’s gonna miss an entire month of school. Did they not tell you I was coming?”

“No.” Clint said slowly shaking Kate’s hand. 

“I don’t need a tutor.” Marlena said quickly. 

She knew Kate was only there so she could keep up with whatever work she was going to miss during the next couple of weeks, but the implication that she needed help along with it felt a little insulting. 

Clint stepped in front of Marlena to talk to Kate. Marlena turned to go upstairs to her room, but Clint was already letting Kate in the doorway. 

“Why don’t you show Kate up to your room so you two can work.” he said.

Marlena stopped on the stairs and looked down at the two of them. “Dude, I didn’t sign up for this.” 

“It’s a mandatory thing.” Kate explained. “The school doesn’t want your GPA to drop because of this.” 

Great, Kate knew about the fight, although Marlena figured that it would have been weirder if Kate didn’t know about it. 

“I’ll talk to mom when she gets home,” Clint said. Marlena had been so used to him being the easy-going guy who liked cooking and couldn’t name a sports team to save his life that hearing him slip into his cover didn’t do much for her  growing uncomfortable mood. “She probably knows more about this than I do.” 

Marlena let out a sigh. “Whatever.” 

She continued up the stairs and heard Kate’s quick steps following her. When they got to her bedroom, Marlena kicked the clothes she had strewn across the floor into her closet and pointed to her desk. “You can use my desk chair if you want.” 

Kate nodded and dragged the chair over to the bed where Marlena was now sitting. “So, all your teachers said that your grades are pretty good, but you’ve got a  _ lot _ of stuff to keep up with, especially since you’re going to be coming back to school right before finals start.” 

“Mmm.” Marlena hummed. 

Kate looked at her as if she was waiting for Marlena to say something else, and when she didn’t she let out a sigh and passed her the tote bag with books. “Here, I assume you’ll be smart enough to figure all this out since you clearly think this is a waste of time.” 

That took Marlena aback. She knew that she was throwing up an attitude, but had gotten so used to everyone else in her life skirting around it until it exploded to confront her about it. Clearly Kate was not one of those people, but Marlena didn’t let that show. She hoped that at the very least, she could just get her schoolwork in peace and not have to deal with Kate’s tutoring, but something told her that wasn’t going to happen. 

She dumped the contents of her bag. “I didn’t say that.” Marlena mumbled. 

“You didn’t have to. I know that ‘I’m too smart for this’ look. We do go to a private school after all.” Kate said. 

“Fair enough.” 

She decided to start on her physics work first, taking her time with it as she switched back and forth between problems on singularity and watching Kate watch her. Marlena didn’t think she had seen Kate around school before, although she didn’t really know anyone at school aside from her teachers and the one girl she was always paired with to do stretches in dance. As she snuck quick glances at Kate, Marlena tried to place if she had seen her floating around the halls between classes or if she was in one of her classes but just hadn’t paid enough attention. When she couldn’t place her anywhere, she began to think that Kate might have been a year or two below her, but when she saw the student id tucked into the back of Kate’s see-through phone case that said ‘grade 12’, she threw that theory out the window. 

“Who do you have for physics?” Marlena finally asked, tired of trying to play  _ Guess Who. _

“Oh I don’t have a science class.” Kate said as she scrolled through her phone. “I did really well on placements and finals last year, so I didn’t have to take one this year.”

“Must be nice.” Marlena said. 

“Yeah. You have Mr. Dillard, right? I hear he’s a dick.” 

“Is he? I thought he was just weirdly racist to me.” 

“Oh please, try being one of the only Korean kid in the entire school.” 

That got a small laugh out of Marlena. She worked on her assignment for a few more minutes before passing it to Kate. “Finished.” 

Kate raised an eyebrow. “Already?”

“I'm not stupid.” 

Kate chuckled at that. “I'll be the judge of that.” She took the notebook, glanced back and forth between her own notebook, and raised an eyebrow after a few moments. “Are you sure you need a tutor?”

“Oh I'm positive that I don't need one. Honestly you're getting paid to do nothing.” Marlena said, her chest puffed out a little bit. It was easy for her to forget how smart she actually was when she was surrounded by kids at the same class ranks as her, especially now when she wasn't in school. Hearing Kate praise her work inflated her ego more than a little bit. 

“Well, guess I can’t beat free money.” Kate put the assignment in the tote bag. “Just finish the rest of that and I’ll turn it in for you tomorrow.” 

Marlena finished her homework, and passed each assignment to Kate for her to glance over. She started to feel a little less annoyed with her being there, she hadn’t realized how long it had been since she had someone her age to talk to that wasn’t passing rumors around behind her back. When she was finished, she led Kate back downstairs to the front door. 

“Oh wait, before I forget.” Kate whipped her backpack off her shoulders and dug around one of the pouches before pulling out a ziplock bag of peppermints. “Your French teacher wanted me to give these to you. Mrs. Laurent, right?” 

Marlena smiled as she took the bag in her hands. “Yeah. Thanks. See you tomorrow?” 

Kate nodded. “If you’ve got homework, then yeah. See you tomorrow.” 

As it turned out, Marlena did have homework the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Marlena was slightly annoyed by her work load, having already gotten used to not having to do any work in the evenings during the first few days of suspension, but by the third day of Kate’s evening visits, Marlena was glad for her company. Kate was stubborn and witty, which would have gotten on her nerves if it weren’t for the fact that she was such a delight to be around. 

After the third day of Kate’s evening visits, they had put off doing work altogether. Kate had quickly dropped her studious tutor facade, and would let Marlena copy off her own work if they had similar assignments. 

“It’s not like you’re gonna fail anyway,” Kate explained, “they’ll probably let you redo a bunch of this shit when you get back. It’s no big deal.” 

“Well thank G-d I’ve got you to teach me.” Marlena had replied. 

It was Friday, she and Kate were both sitting on her bed, a pile of work spread out between them, though neither one of them was paying much attention to it. Marlena was popping mints from the bag Mrs. Laurent had given her into her mouth. She had gotten another bag from Kate the last two days. Marlena felt it was excessive, but who was she to pass up free candy? She passed one to Kate who had an increasing pile of wrappers sitting in her lap. 

“G-d mints are the most boring candy but I can’t stop eating these.” Marlena said as she unwrapped another. “I’m probably just gonna live off these from now on. I’m over my dad’s variations of chicken and pasta.” 

“Oh G-d. My stepmom makes shrimp alfredo like three times a week. I will  _ gladly _ take your dad’s shitty chicken any day.” Kate laughed. 

“G-d, I wish my mom would cook more often.” Marlena said. In the short few days that Kate had been coming over, it had gotten a lot easier for Marlena to refer to Clint and Natasha as her parents. It wasn’t any less awkward, but she didn’t stumble through it anymore. 

“Wanna switch?” Kate asked. 

_ Wanna stay for dinner?  _ Marlena almost asked. She pushed the thought out of her head. It had only been three days, but Marlena knew that familiar flame building in her chest when she would look at Kate or make her laugh. She didn’t dare call it a crush or let Kate know that though. After her fight with Macy, she was sure the whole school knew that she was a lesbian, but if Kate knew, she didn’t show it. Some small cynical part of Marlena felt that this was all just some elaborate prank being pulled on her, setting her up for some grand scheme when she finally returned to school. But Kate was far too casual around Marlena for that to be true. Kate hadn’t even so much as asked her about the fight or mentioned that she was suspended. It was nice to be in a space that felt like it was cut off from every other problem Marlena had been having for the past couple of weeks. Kate was easy to talk to, and despite the fact that she had only known her for a few days, Marlena hoped that whatever this was growing between them would maintain itself when she went back to school. 

There was a knock at the door which got both girls’ attention. Clint and Natasha hardly ever messed with Marlena and Kate while they were up in her room, so this was out of place, even for the short life of this schedule. 

“Yes?” Marlena called. 

The door opened and Natasha poked her head in. “Kate, I’m sorry but you’ll have to go home early today.” she said. “Did you finish all your work Lysette?” she asked Marlena. 

“Uh, almost. What’s going on?” Marlena asked confused. 

“We have company from work. I forgot to tell you earlier.” 

For some reason, Marlena’s first thought was that some other, much more recognizable Avenger, had dropped in with another mission to save the world. But when she realized what Natasha really meant, her face fell; Fury.

“Oh.” Marlena said. “Okay, I’ll walk Kate down.” 

“Be quick please.” Natasha said before closing the door. 

Kate turned to face Marlena and raised an eyebrow. “Company from work? Ominous much?” 

“Heh. Well, my parents have weird jobs.” Marlena said putting her assignments into Kate’s tote bag. 

“Where do they work?” Kate asked. 

Marlena froze for a moment, trying to rack her brain for what Natasha had told her to say all the way back in September. “Just, some government stuff. I never really ask.” 

Kate shrugged her shoulders. “Eh, whatever. Probably boring as hell anyways.” 

_ Oh you have  _ no _ idea.  _

Marlena walked Kate down to the front door, and just as she was about to say goodbye, Kate asked her, “Hey do you wanna like, hang out tomorrow or something?” 

“Uh,” Marlena faltered, “Sure.” 

Kate flashed her a smile. “Cool. When can I drop by?” 

“I’m usually out of bed at like nine, so anytime after that is cool.” 

“Alright, see you then.” 

Kate waved goodbye and went out the door. Marlena stood there for a moment, watching as she walked down the sidewalk the same way she had every day this week. She was going to hang out tomorrow, with a person other than Clint and Natasha. It was going to be a hard sixteen hours waiting for Kate to show up. 

“Making friends?” 

Marlena jumped at the sudden voice behind her. She whipped around and saw Fury standing a couple feet back. “Jeezus Christ.” she gasped. 

Fury chuckled. “Didn’t mean to scare you, but she seemed nice. Friend from school?” 

“She’s uh, she’s my tutor, but she’s cool.” Marlena said. 

She leaned against the doorframe, trying to put up a casual act, although she knew she was failing at that. What the hell had brought him here? The obvious answer was their phone call the other day, but she hadn’t actually invited him to come over. She should have known better though, the tense and stunted way she had spoken to him wasn’t a red flag, but a clear indictor that there was more to be said. 

Fury nodded. “So, about that phone call the other day,” he started, “you sounded, out of it? That’s a thing you kids say right?”

“That’s a thing most people say.” Marlena corrected. She walked past him and went into the living room. Clint and Natasha weren’t there, which annoyed Marlena a little bit. She appreciated the privacy Natasha had given her the other day when she had called him, but now that he had showed up uninvited, she felt like he was overstepping. She wasn’t prepared to have a ‘drop on in’ relationship with him yet. It hadn’t even been a full six months since she’d met him, and they’d only spoken face to face three times now, all within the first month of meeting. 

What the hell were they even going to say to each other? She had already apologized for speaking ot him so badly the other day, and Clint had already given her the ‘We’re here for you’ speech, she didn’t need another. 

Marlena sat down on the couch and Fury in the armchair next to the coffee table. 

“Are you doing okay?” Fury asked. 

“I’m fine.” Marlena said.

“I mean after what you said the other day.” 

“I apologized, what’s so weird about that.” 

“The  _ other _ other day. Joking about hate crimes is a pretty heavy thing Marlena. Are you feeling safe at school?” 

“I will now that they all know not to mess with me.” 

Fury paused before saying anything else. She knew she was being brash, but what else was she to say? She sure as hell wasn’t going to lie and say she had been reflecting on her choice and regretted it. Macy deserved way more than Marlena had given her, and if she ever got the chance, she’d do the same to Nate. 

“Marlena,” Fury sighed.

“I’m telling the truth.” she said defensively. 

“I can see that, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to say.” 

“Would you prefer if I lied and said that I don’t feel safe?” 

“No, because I know that you don’t feel safe.” 

Marlena wrinkled her nose at that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Fury leaned forward in the armchair. “An animal backed into a corner does what it needs to to survive. You didn’t feel safe, so you acted as if fighting was your only option, but it wasn’t. You had other options, and completely ignored them.”

“Options like what? Getting hate crimed?”

“Marlena,” that fed up tone from the night he called her crept back into his voice. 

“What did you want me to do? Go cry to a therapist?”

“I would prefer you do that than break a girl’s nose.” 

It was hard for Marlena to not throw the fact that he was running an agency that hired assassins, assassins she was living with, back in his face, but that would be too far out of the relevancy of what they were discussing. She knew that would make her sound desperate to sbe right and angry, which she was. Pride was one hell of a drug, and she wasn’t going to throw it away all because Fury and every other adult in the house suddenly didn’t condone fighting. 

All of that considered, Marlena still said what she said, “I would have done worse if Clint hadn’t stopped me.” 

“And then you would’ve been expelled and,” 

Marlena waved her hands for him to stop. “Just, stop. I don’t need the whole ‘you should be ashamed of yourself’ talk. I  _ really _ don’t. I know that I did something wrong in you guys’ eyes, but I’m not going to lie and say that I feel bad about it, because I don’t, and I won’t.

All I’m sorry for is how I acted when I got home because I was way out of turn. I was defending myself, I wasn’t backed into a corner, Macy put her hands on me first, and her boyfriend was threatening to assault me if I hadn’t done anything.” 

“You don’t know how to talk to people.” Fury said without hesitation.

“We’re talking right now and I can talk to Kate just fine.” 

“Oh you mean this angry outburst and your tutor? You know what I mean.” 

“Yeah, I do, and I do suck at talking, but I got my message across loud and clear.”

“Talking to  _ us _ Marlena.” 

She heaved out a sigh. She knew what he menat, but she didn’t want to hear him say it. Of course she didn’t know how to talk to them, she had never tried to confide in an adult for most of her life. Her mom was always shut in her own misery, teachers ignored her, and even if she did talk to them, it’s not like they would listen. Not talking was all Marlena had ever knonw how to do until moments like these when her emotions reached a boiling point, except how she had gotten there in a much shorter amount of time than she usually did. 

“I don’t have anything else to say since you wanna talk about  _ talking _ .” Marlena said gruffly. 

“You will at some point.” Fury said flatly. 

Neither one of them moved from their seats, and Marlena laughed when she remembered how she almost asked Kate to stay for dinner. Oh what a sight that would have been to have the five of them sitting around a table after this conversation. 

“Are you going to stay for dinner?” she couldn’t help but roll her eyes when she asked. 

“I would if you were asking honestly.” 

“You can if you want, it’s not like I can stop you.” She crossed her arms and leaned back against the couch. “Not like I have any agency around here anyway. I can’t even defend my own choices without it being questioned.” 

“Well until you’re 18 and if you keep making stupid choices like this, that’s how it’s going to stay.” Fury got up from the armchair. 

“No, please, you stay, I’ll go. Wouldn’t wanna disrupt whatever gossip you and Natasha have to pass around about Clint.” 

She got up from the couch and went back upstairs. After a few minutes, she heard the front door open and close, and footsteps coming up the stairs, followed by a knock at her door again. 

“Dinner’s ready.” Clint said. 

“I’m not hungry.”  she answered. 

She unwrapped another one of Mrs. Laurent’s mints and kept eating them until her teeth felt brittle from all the sugar. She started to wonder just how many more mints it would take for Mrs. Laruent to send her before she could realistically live off them and never have to be bothered to leave her room again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you'll have to pry korean kate bishop headcanons from my cold dead hands


	8. Tell No Tales

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> long chapter again cause idk what moderation is. shoutout to my friend moonz for beta-ing this for me.

That night, Marlena had the worst nightmare she had had since the one with her parents the first night in the house. She was back in she and her mother’s apartment building in New York. The outside looked the same as she last remembered seeing it, brick exterior, garden boxes and AC units in the windows, the funk in the air coming from the dumpster on the side of the building. Home sweet home. She went inside and up the three flights of stairs, even passing by her old neighbor, Mr. Douglas on the way up. 

“Good evening Mr. Douglas.” Marlena had said as she always did when she saw him. Mr. Douglas gave a grunt in reply, just as he did in real life. 

When she reached her apartment, she found the spare key taped to the top of the door frame as it had always been. Everything felt so familiar, that Marlena forgot she was dreaming up until she put the key in the lock and went inside. The hallway extended for yards before her, the paint and pictures on the wall were the same as they had been in real life, but they repeated every couple feet like she was walking through a seam in a design. She wasn’t sure how far down she walked before the hallway opened up to a dark room. The temperature dropped suddenly and Marlena could see her breath, she wrapped her arms around her and called out for anybody, but her words were voiceless. She stopped calling out soundlessly after a few tries at screaming, and walked around the perimeter of the room. 

It may have been dark, but there was enough light bouncing off the walls, giving them a shining silver look, they were metal. Marlena ran her hand against the cool walls, and after a few feet, felt her fingers give into something, a door latch. She pulled, but it didn’t give. She tried again, feeling her grunts of effort vibrating in her voice as she did, and finally was rewarded when one final tug revealed a drawer opening before her. Marlena stumbled backward a few steps and when she regained her balance, walked toward the now open drawer to see a body laying before her. 

She felt the scream rip from her throat, but there still wasn’t any sound. Marlena wrapped her arms around herself again and walked backwards away from the body. In her haste to get away, she hadn’t gotten a good look at who it had been, but even if she had, the quick flash of the black rotting skin was seared into her retinas. 

An invisible fog that had lifted from her eyes and when she blinked a few times trying to wake herself up, she saw that she was in a morgue. The walls lined with drawers, and an examination table in the middle of the room. It was empty at first, but when she blinked again, there was a body there; her own. 

Sound finally started to return, and Marlena heard herself whimper at the sight. She was as dead and decaying as the body in the drawer. Her dark skin flecked with black spots of rot and her hair dry and brittle in a frizzy halo around her head. Her back hit something hard and for a moment she was afraid she had bumped into another wall of drawers, but instead it was much worse. 

Something fell with a heavy thud on her shoulder. Marlena squeezed her eyes shut, too afraid to look, but the thing that had fell on her shoulder grew heavier and she felt her skin burn as the pressure grew. Her whimpers turned into cries, and then sobs. The force that had hold of her grew heavier and hotter until she felt paralyzed. For a brief moment though, she was released from the sensation. She had taken in a deep breath to try and steady herself, trying to force herself to realize this was a dream, that she was safe and sound in her bed with Clint and Natasha just down the hall if something dangerous was around the corner. When she did that, the pressure ceased, and Marlena pulled herself forward, free from whatever had taken hold of her. 

She stumbled forward and bumped into the examination table. Marlena heaved and for a moment she feared she was going to throw up, but the force fell upon her again, but this time, it pulled her back by her hair, forcing her head to turn around. It was her father, or what was left of him. Just like in her dream before, he was rotting, but this time it was more extreme. The smell coming off his body seemed so real Marlena was afraid she was going to wake herself up choking on her own bile. But what woke her up was what happened next. 

Sense returned to her body and she suddenly remembered that she had a voice. She screamed, and screamed, and screamed, for what felt like ages. She and her father stood barely a foot apart from each other, staring at each other as she screamed, not moving or saying anything. When Marlena stopped to catch her breath, the heat in her father’s touch returned. He had his hand on her shoulder again, she looked down and saw that his hand had exploded with a bright blue flare. The flare shot up his arm and continued until it was covering his entire body, and then Marlena’s and then the entire room. 

_ Always expect more,  _ a voice said, but it wasn’t Fury’s. It was masculine, but nothing she could place her finger on. It wasn’t until she snapped her eyes open that she realized it had been her father’s. 

She didn’t wake up screaming, but she did manage to tangle herself in her sheets, clearly she hadn’t been as paralyzed in reality as she had been in her dream. When she was fully awake, Marlena had to pull herself out of bed, still wrapped up in her sheets, and pace for a few moments before she felt her energy starting to wind down again. What the fuck had she just seen? She knew her argument with Fury had been frustrating, but there wasn’t any way that this nightmare had been triggered by that. Marlena tried to tell herself that this was some exaggerated take on her memories from the New York attack, imagining herself being the victim of alien abduction or something. But something in the back of her head told her that that wasn’t it either. 

Too scared to go back to sleep, Marlena went downstairs as she usually did after a routine nightmare, and poured herself a glass of water. Tonight however, no one woke up to see what was happening. Clint and Natasha had both gotten used to her post-nightmare treks through the house. Sometimes, they would simply call down the hall to ask if she was okay, while others one of them would come knocking on her door or coming downstairs to check on her. Marlena had become numb to their check-ups, just tossing it up as another aspect of their job that they had to deal with. Some nights though, she would enjoy their company, especially on nights like tonight when her dreams scared her so badly she felt as if she had been reduced to a kindergartner scared of the Boogeyman. But this wasn’t a Boogeyman she could escape or lock away in a closet. 

Marlena let out a heavy sigh and took her glass back upstairs. Back in her room, she decided to go on her laptop and see how far down the rabbit hole she could go before sleep finally got her again (although she was hoping it wouldn’t). Despite the fact that she had been home every day this week with plenty of time to mess around before Kate came over, she hadn’t actually spent a great deal of time on her computer. Ten minutes into some YouTube video on Denver Airport conspiracy theories, a spark of curiosity went off in Marlena. 

She had dreamt of her father before, but those dreams were usually her running down an endless hallway, shouting at him to answer her as he got further and further away. There had been a few dreams since her arrival in DC similar to the one she had the first night. During the summer after the funeral, she had a recurring dream that she was going to lay flowers on her parents graves and they would appear in front of her in the similar zombie form she had seen them in weeks before. 

Those dreams had been what kicked off Clint and Natasha’s night watch for Marlena. It wasn’t until the start of the school year that Marlena started to become accustomed to the dreams and could wake up without screaming her head off. It wasn’t something she had overcome, but at least she could predict what would happen and knew how to handle herself after she woke. But this dream had been so vivid and different from the others, it almost tricked her into thinking that it was a memory despite the fact that she had never seen a morgue outside of a tv screen. All her other nightmares started off like that one had; she would be in a familiar place, either the graveyard or her apartment in New York, before tumbling into hell. 

Marlena typed her father’s name into Google for the first time in months. After her initial search had brought her to the same dead ends of a halted search in Virginia Beach with few witnesses and even fewer clues, she had given up. The files Fury had given her were still redacted and sitting in her closet, and she still hadn’t worked up the courage to look inside the notebook her mother had left for her in New York. 

_ Ask me next time. _ The note had said. Her mother hadn’t gotten a next time, but Marlena had her’s right now. She turned on the lamp at her desk and went to the closet to dig up the box of files. She had stashed them in the back corner in a fit of frustration after days of looking at the blacked out lines lead her to nothing over and over again. She left the files and went straight for the notebook. Just holding it in her hands made her think of the guilt she had felt for stealing it from her mother’s room in the first place. All that snooping for nothing, she could have asked, her mother had wanted her to ask, and neither one of them had been given the chance to talk about what was in this blue composition book. It felt like a joke that all the years of secrets could have been talked about in one evening if Marlena hadn’t been such a chicken shit. But was that what was even in this notebook? 

She had always known it had to be something personal if her mother had always gone through such trouble to keep it out of reach. But in the end, it had been something her mother had wanted to talk about. Marlena knew it was only because she was old enough to understand and ask the right questions, all the times before Marlena had stumbled upon it she was in middle school. 

Marlena took the notebook to her desk and peered at her mother’s handwriting in the box on the front for people’s names.  _ Property of Sarah Y DuMont.  _ Her mother must have started keeping it after her father had died as she used her maiden name. It was a simple motion, but opening the cover of the notebook felt like moving through cement. When she finally had the notebook open, the first page was empty. It didn’t alarm her, it was a habit of her mother’s that she had passed down to Marlena to not write on the first page of a notebook. Marlena flipped to the next page, and saw line after line of words and paragraphs. She should have felt relieved, she was finally on the track to the questions she had never been able to ask her mother. But the words were illegible. 

It was nonsense. Words, letters, numbers, and symbols thrown together haphazardly. Marlena’s hands shook as she flipped through page after page of gibberish. Of course it wouldn’t have been that easy. Even in death, her mother’s past evaded Marlena. She wanted to be angry, but she couldn’t find it in her. All she could feel was confusion, which melted into determination. 

She flipped back to the first page of the journal, reading the line at the top of the page over and over until the words seemed to vibrate the way they did when reading for too long. 

_ BloodoJoyceZeroAlphaL I Start I Alpha _

_ Robin sin POT. Viral A. Sin Graham Ares. Sin Graham Styx.  _

It wasn’t gibberish, it was a code. 

Of course her mother wouldn’t just keep whatever Earth shattering secrets she had kept away for thirteen years openly available in any language she or Marlena could learn online. Whatever this was, it was important enough to code, which also meant it was dangerous enough to bring trouble. How hadn’t Shield taken this into their property when they rummaged the apartment for Marlena’s things? Was this a fake? It couldn’t have been. If Fury had wanted this for himself, he could have easily taken for himself and never tell Marlena about it, it wasn’t like Marlena would have thought much about it in the aftermath. 

Marlena shut the notebook, turned off the lamp, and went back to bed, tucking the notebook under her mattress. It felt silly at first, Clint and Natasha didn’t know about it, and it wasn’t as if she was going to be leaving the house for hours at a time for them to sneak in and slip it out of hiding. 

That made Marlena remember her date with Kate in the morning.  _ It’s not a date. _ Marlena corrected herself. She looked at the time on her phone, it was two in the morning, she hadn’t given Kate any specific time to come over, but knew it was better to go to sleep than stay up deliberating the ever expanding conspiracy theory that was her life. 

When she settled back into bed, it took her ages to finally fall into sleep. The notebook under her mattress made Marlena think of  _ The Princess and the Pea _ . She wondered if her prize for feeling the weight of the secrets stashed away under her head would be as rewarding as the end of that fairy tale. 

* * *

Marlena was woken up by the sound of the doorbell going off downstairs. She got out of bed to go down and open the door, but saw that Natasha had beat her to it.

“Good morning Kate.” Natasha said when she opened the door. “You and Lysette working on a project or something?” 

“Uh, no ma’am. We were just gonna hang out.” Kate said.

Natasha looked up at Marlena who had stopped halfway down the stairs. “Hhm. She didn’t tell us anything about this last night.” 

“Your company had me distracted.” Marlena said flatly. She went the rest of the way down the stairs and greeted Kate. “You’re here early.” 

“You said you wake up after nine. It’s nine thirty.” Kate smirked. 

Marlena rolled her eyes. “We’ll be in my room.” she said to Natasha as she opened the door wider for Kate and went upstairs. 

“How exactly did  _ company _ go last night?” Kate asked once they were in Marlena’s room with the door shut behind them. 

Marlena groaned and flopped onto her bed. “Horrible. I don’t wanna talk about it.” 

“Fair enough. So, any ideas for today?” Kate asked joining her on the bed. 

Despite the fact that it was the middle of  September, Kate was wearing shorts and a tank top with a jean jacket to complete the look. Her knee bumped against Marlena’s bare leg and suddenly Marlena was self conscious about the fact that she hadn’t put on bottoms longer than the boxers she slept in with donuts printed on them. She moved her leg over to put some space between them. Kate was sitting a lot closer to her than she normally had during their tutor sessions. 

“I dunno, this was your idea.” Marlena said, trying to keep her voice casual. “If you have any ideas for something free that’d be great.” 

Kate giggled at that. “I mean I could pay for you if your parents won’t give you money. Also if we get food or see a movie that’s only like twenty bucks. I’m not gonna go broke covering for you.” 

“So lunch and a movie then?” Marlena suggested. 

Kate shrugged her shoulders. “Sounds like a plan to me.” 

Marlena nodded her head. It was still too early to do either of those things, but she would have much rather preferred to not stay in the house for another two hours when matinee showings started at the movie theater. 

“We can hang out here until a movie starts. You can pick.” Marlena said sliding off the bed and walking to the closet to pick out something to wear. She turned around when she grabbed a pair of jeans and the least wrinkled t-shirt she could find. “You wouldn’t mind waiting downstairs while I get dressed, would you?” she asked. 

“Yeah, sure.” Kate replied. She walked out the door. Marlena took much longer getting ready than she normally would have. Since Yuell had a uniform policy, she hadn’t had the freedom to take the time to pick out outfits like she had at her old school. Sure her outfit today might have just been a simple jeans and white v-neck t-shirt combo with the checkered jacket she had tried to wear on the first day of school, but it felt nice to finally wear something that wasn’t pajamas or khakis for what felt like the first time in ages. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Marlena wanted to look cool in front of Kate. This was a completely normal, casual, and platonic friendly hangout. 

When she was dressed, Marlena went downstairs and saw Kate sitting in armchair in the living room with Clint and Natasha on the couch. The scenario looked too much like something out of an 80s teen romcom that Marlena had to roll her lips together to keep from laughing. If it weren’t for the fact that Kate didn’t at all look nervous or intimidated by Clint and Natasha’s questions, she might have stepped in quicker to rescue her, but Kate was clearly handling things well by herself. 

“I mean, it’s not like we’ve got any problem with you two hanging out.” she heard Clint say. “It’s just that she’s had a hard time, adjusting, to this new school.”

“What he’s trying to say is we wanna make sure you’re not one of those jerks that was bullying our daughter.” Natasha cut in. 

“Please, I’ve got better things to do than bother other people when I’m at school.” Kate said. “And even if I did know those girls, it’s not like we’d be friends.” 

“Are you guys interrogating my friend? Seriously.” Marlena said stepping into the living room. 

“Well it’s just that we’ve never really met Kate before.” Natasha said, laying on the sweet mom role a little too thick. Marlena knew she was probably just teasing, but she rolled her eyes anyway. 

“Whatever. Kate you ready to go?” 

Clint raised an eyebrow. “It’s barely ten o’clock, you guys are gonna leave already?” 

“I mean, yeah. I haven’t left the house all week, I’m bored.” 

He and Natasha exchanged a look between each other, and Marlena knew that if Kate wasn’t in the room, they would have swapped something in one of the many languages they knew. She had seen them doing it before, chatting away in Portuguese, Italian, or Hebrew, they had spoken in French one day during the summer, something about a past mission in Budapest. Marlena had been mostly ignoring it while she had been sitting on the couch scrolling through Netflix, but when Clint said something about the night after the mission being more memorable, Marlena had chimed in saying “Pumba, pas devant les enfants.” Natasha had laughed a little before switching to some other European sounding language. 

“Okay well be back by six.” Natasha instructed as she got up from the couch.

“That’s so early!” Marlena protested. 

“Yeah, well technically you’re still supposed to be on punishment.”

“For the fight or for  _ company _ last night?” 

Both Clint and Natasha shot her a look. “Don’t make me make it five o’clock.” Natasha said sternly. 

“Ugh. Fine. Six o’clock.” she waved her hand gesturing for Kate to get up. “C’mon. Let’s go before they say noon.” 

“Don’t worry Mr. and Mrs. Ryan,” Kate said, laying on an extra layer of sweetness in her voice, “I’ll have your daughter home before her carriage turns back into a pumpkin.” 

Marlena couldn’t hide her laughter at Kate’s tone. She waved her goodbyes to Clint and Natasha and walked out the door with Kate. Once they were out of the house, they walked up the street with no real direction in mind yet. 

“Your parents are funny.” Kate said when they turned onto a new street, leaving the house out of sight behind them. 

Marlena rolled her eyes. “Please, they’re annoying.” 

“Every kid thinks their parents are annoying.” Kate said.

“Yeah, which is why you think mine are funny. I’d probably think your parents are funny.” 

Kate laughed loudly at that. “Well then by your logic you’d probably think Macy’s parents are funny.” 

That made Marlena stop and laugh for a few seconds. “Oh they’re hilarious. They thought I was going to seriously write an apology letter to their daughter.” 

“Are you serious?” Kate asked raising her eyebrow. 

“As a heart attack. They came to the school when I was waiting in Principal Steven’s office going on and on how I needed to apologize.” she explained picking up her pace again. 

“Did you?”

“Fuck no. My parents are already paying for her medical bills. And besides, even if I did write one, it would’ve sucked. I don’t feel sorry for her.” 

Saying it aloud again made her think about her conversation with Fury the night before. Listening to her boast so loudly about it almost made her feel sorry for how hard and rudely she had defended her actions to him. Maybe she was in the wrong, but when Kate smiled and laughed at what she said as she pictured the scenario Marlena had explained, she knew that this was a better victory than if she had left Macy alone and not been suspended. 

They walked to a bus stop a few blocks down and kept talking. It was the first time that Marlena had talked to someone other than the adults in her life about school, the fight, and herself. It felt good, it felt normal. Given her personal track record with making friends, she and Kate were moving at an Olympic runner’s speed in terms of how quickly they were getting along. It made Marlena wonder if Kate was in a similar boat as her, only child, remarkably unspectacular school career, with a perfectly adequate, even if stale, home life (well, the facade of an adequate home life for Marlena). 

Marlena wanted to know more about Kate. During their study sessions, they mostly joked back and forth about teachers, and even then that was still mostly just Kate talking, seeing as she had been at Yuell all four years and had more stories to tell about the school. Marlena had been careful to plot out how she told her stories. Each time she wanted to say something about an event that happened in New York, she had to go through it slowly, making sure to say Eugene, Oregon, or change memories of a cramped apartment to a standard sized three bedroom house in the suburbs. It was annoying at first, and Marlena feared that Kate would think the way she had to slowly trot out her stories or think for a moment too long before finishing them was weird and stop offering to get off topic and focus on classwork, but she never did. In Marlena’s eyes, that damn near made Kate a saint. She never had to explain herself around her, or feel like she had to cover up her personality, there was an instant bond between them, and Marlena was ready for it to stay that way when she went back to school next month. 

When the bus pulled up, they sat toward the back even though it was still empty given the early hour. They got off at a shopping mall that was just opening and Kate walked them over to an empty diner. “C’mon, we can share a breakfast platter, they’re pretty big.” she said. 

Marlena followed her to a booth and they sat, placed their orders, and waited for their food. 

“So, what movie did you pick?” Marlena asked, scribbling in the kids menu that had been left on the table. 

“ _ Moonrise Kingdom _ is the only okay-ish thing out right now. That good with you?” Kate asked, she was working over the crossword puzzle on her own kids’ menu. Marlena wondered if the waiter had left them their on accident or if he was just teasing them. 

“Fine with me. What’s it about?” 

“Wes Anderson movie about these two kids that run away together after they fall in love.” 

Marlena snorted at that. “Kate Bishop are you taking me to see an aesthetic retelling of  _ Romeo + Juliet?” _

Her tone was jovial, but Marlena was glad that her dark skin didn’t show the heat rising in her face. They were just friends, this was  _ just _ a hangout, not a date. Sure, Kate was sharing a giant platter of pancakes and bacon with her, and told Marlena not to stress about the bill or splitting the tip when their check came, and paid for her movie ticket and popcorn, and then picked a seat toward the back of the theater. It was platonic. It only felt weird because it had been so long since Marlena had been out in a normal teenage fashion. Kate wasn’t gay, and if she was, she probably had a girlfriend, she was too pretty not to, or just wanted to be friends with Marlena. 

But when they left the theater, and Kate kept suggesting other places in the mall to hang out at, and offered to buy Marlena a shirt, Marlena’s theories that this was just a friendly hangout grew more and more skewed. Each time she would glance at Kate and notice something more enticing about her. The shape of her nose, her deep brown eyes that Marlena would have to force herself to look away from, the mole she had seen behind her ear while they were waiting to be let into a dressing room. It was maddening. 

Marlena tried to brush it off as her crushing too hard and too fast after not having a real crush since the tenth grade (Misty Williams would forever be her first love). But when they finally got back on the bus right around four o’clock to head back to Marlena’s house, Kate sat with her knee pressed against Marlena’s just like she had on her bed that morning. She had moved over a little to give Kate some room, trying to see if it was a coincidence, but when she did, Kate’s knee simply bumped against hers again, and it stayed there the rest of the ride home. 

When they were walking back up the street to Marlena’s house, they were a lot more quiet than they had been on the walk to the bus stop that morning. They reached Marlena’s street, and Marlena finally spoke up.

“So this was fun.” she said slowly. 

Kate nodded. “We should do this again. Sucks that we had to meet cause of your fight though. Would’ve been nice to get to know you at school.” 

Marlena shrugged her shoulders. “Eh. It was probably going to happen at some point or another.” 

“Fair enough. But hey, one week down, two to go.”

“Ugh. Don’t remind me.” Marlena groaned. “You’re seriously the only good part about this suspension.” 

Kate gave a soft smile, but didn’t say anything else. When they reached the doorstep, and Marlena unlocked the door, she paused for a moment, trying to think of something more profound than ‘thanks for the day’ to send Kate off with. 

“I’d say ‘see you tomorrow’ but you’ve seen me six days in a row now.” Marlena said jokingly. “You’re probably tired of me.” 

Kate laughed a little. “Yeah I guess six days in a row is a lot huh? I need a breather from the riveting dramatics that come from hanging out with you.” 

Marlena gave a small smile. There was nothing else she could think to say, so she said goodbye, and started to unlock the door, but Kate's hand brushed against her's and Marlena looked back. Kate held Marlena's hand gently in her own, rubbing her thumb across the back of her hand slowly. Marlena's face burned and her heart was racing. Any of her hesitations about Kate not having some sort of attraction to her were dashed away. For a moment, Marlena thought she was going to lean up and kiss her, but instead, she shook Marlena's hand, said goodbye, and hurried off the doorstep. 

Marlena watched her walk quickly up the sidewalk until she disappeared around the corner. A heavy, shaky sigh escaped her, and she unlocked the door.  _So much for a regular friend hangout._  

“How was your date?” Natasha called from the living room. 

Marlena couldn’t even bring herself to say ‘it wasn’t a date’ because after that moment on the doorstep, she wasn’t sure anymore. Instead, she walked into the living room, dropped into the empty armchair and said, “I thought the U-Haul lesbian thing was a myth.”

“Well look at it this way, at least you get to see her every day.” Natasha laughed. 

“How is that going to help me avoid U-Hauling?”

“Oh it’s not. I just said look at it that way, not that it was going to help you.” 

“G-d you’re the worst.” 

Marlena started to wind down for the evening. It was just past six o’clock and she knew Clint and Natasha would be awake for another two hours at most. She showered, helped with the dishes, and even went back upstairs to clean her room. She needed to keep herself busy until she knew that she could pull out the notebook and work undisturbed. 

She knew asking the two adults for help decoding the notebook would probably work in her favor, but she also knew that there was a large possibility that they would report it to Fury. He had let her keep it, which meant he didn’t know what was in it, and Marlena was hoping to keep it that way for now. It felt good to have a real secret for the first time in ages, something to call her own and keep private for the time being. It also felt nice to have something to work on to keep her mind off of her day with Kate. Or to be more specific, the fact that she had a crush on Kate. 

When Marlena exhausted herself of any other ways to waste time until Clint and Natasha went to bed, she went up to her bedroom. They had been downstairs watching a movie on Netflix when Marlena excused herself, saying that she was tired, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. It was barely eight thirty, but Marlena insisted that she wanted to go to sleep when Clint asked if she was sure she didn’t want to stick around for the rest of the movie. 

Once in her bedroom, she got into bed and waited for about an hour to hear Clint and Natasha come up the stairs and go into their room. When she heard the door to the master bedroom click shut, she waited another fifteen minutes to make sure neither one of them straggled back out, before getting the notebook from under her mattress and going to her desk. She turned the lamp on and opened the notebook. She stared at the page before her with a pen twirling in her fingers and a few sheets of blank paper, trying to make some sense of the lines she had read the night before. 

_ BloodoJoyceZeroAlphaL I. Start I Alpha.  _

_ Robin sin POT. Viral A. Sin Graham Ares. Sin Graham Styx.  _

Marlena focused on the second line. Ares and Styx were the only thing she could make some sense of. Ares, the Greek g-d of war, and Styx, the river the dead had to cross to gain access to the Underworld. 

“I should’ve read more  _ Percy Jackson. _ ” Marlena grumbled. 

They had to be codenames for someone or something, but what exactly, Marlena wasn’t sure. She tried to figure out an anagram of the words, which brought her to a dead end fairly quickly. Then she tried counting each letter up to a certain number ahead or behind in the alphabet, which only made the already incomprehensible message even more confusing. The minutes ticked by, and technique, after technique came up with nothing. This wasn’t any standard code from the military or whatever might have been used by Shield when her mother was employed there. This was something of her mother’s creation. Even if she employed the help of her spy guardians, she knew they would only get a few steps ahead before hitting a wall. 

Marlena pulled at her hair in frustration. What the hell could be the key? She stared at the first line for a few minutes. The only connection she could make out was  _ alpha _ , the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Three references to Greece. Marlena’s mind clicked into place. 

She put the pen to the blank sheet of paper and wrote down what she hoped was her first breakthrough of the night. She swapped out the alphas for A’s and the I’s for the number one. 

_ BloodoJoyceZeroAL. 1 Start 1 A _

The code wasn’t based around counting or anagrams, it was association. 

All her life, Marlena and her mother both had habits of associating certain numbers, shapes, and letters, with corresponding things that only made sense to each other. It wasn’t something that was that far of a stretch, Marlena had thought it was something special when she always thought of squares as the letter C or x’s with the color white. It had made perfect sense to her, C was a letter missing on video game controllers, but there was a square, so she put the two together. X was the Latin numeral for ten, ten had a zero, and the inside of a zero was empty, therefore always white when it was written. Marlena had dropped the habit sometime in middle school, but apparently her mother had kept it up, only her coding went far past letters and numbers. 

This was a code designed only for Marlena’s mother to crack and understand. For a moment, Marlena was exhilarated to have started down the path of cracking it, but then a cold fear set into her stomach. This was only something her  _ mother _ had been able to come up with, and would have been the only person to crack it, meaning that whatever this was was something that had only been meant for her mother to know.  _ Ask me next time.  _ It wasn’t an invitation to ask questions, it was an instruction because she would have been the only person alive to understand it. Until now that is. 

* * *

For the rest of that night and weekend, Marlena hacked away tirelessly at the notebook. She hadn’t gotten far, the first two lines had taken her the rest of the first night, and even then, she had only decoded parts of it, having to fill in the rest with assumptions as to what it could mean. 

_ Journal 1. Entry 1.A _

_? without POT (part of ? point of transaction?). Viral Georgia (? a location? The CDC?) No communication with Ares (possible shield agent?? Clint??? Nat???). No communication with Styx (another agent).  _

It had taken her almost six hours to decipher a single two line entry. The only mercy the notebook seemed to be affording her was that each entry started off with the same cypher,  _ BloodoJoyceZeroAlphaL _ . The  _ blood _ was the letter j. J as in jewel, as in diamond, as in blood diamond. O was left by itself, Joyce for James Joyce, author of the book  _ Ulysses _ ,  _ zero _ was the letter n, and then alpha for the letter a, and l left by itself like o. 

When Marlena realized that it was meant to spell  _ journal _ , she wanted to bang her head against the desk. In the frustration of the moment, it didn’t make sense to code the word journal. But then she thought about how frustrated she was getting trying to decode the damn word. This wasn’t meant to make sense to anyone but Sarah, it was supposed to be confusing and infuriating to uncover to any prying eyes. But  _ Journal 1 _ also implied that there were other journals. There were more, but how many, Marlena would never know. She had only ever seen her mother writing in this one, so the one in her current possession was either kept over the years in hopes of further ones to come, or  _ Journal 1 _ was another code. 

By Monday morning, Marlena had gotten through the entire first page. There were still bits and pieces missing, but she knew that as she worked further into the notebook, she would be able to come back to what she had missed and fill in the blanks. 

The first page had read:

 

_ BloodoJoyceZeroAlphaL I. Start I.Alpha _

_ Robin sin POT. Viral A. Sin Graham Ares. Sin Graham Styx.  _

 

_ BloodoJoyceZeroAlphaL II. Start I.Beta _

_ Simba con POT. Graham con Ares. Sin Graham Styx. _

 

_ BloodoJoyceZeroAlphaL III. Start I.Gamma (kkkkkkkk) _

_ Fairest sin POT. Viral Sigur A. Sin Graham Ares. Sin Graham Styx. Heysatan Hawkeye. Bridge?  _

 

It helped that the first two entries were similar, but the third one had Marlena stuck for all of Sunday night. She had resorted to Google translate to decode  _ sigur _ and  _ heysatan, _ the Icelandic words for victory and haystack. The mention of Hawkeye had made Marlena’s heart race when she saw it. Clint’s Avenger codename. 

Anything relating to the Avengers was never talked about in the house, but Marlena was still a normal human living in a world that had just been saved by superheroes. The public might not have known their real names, but the codenames Black Widow and Hawkeye had been released in the aftermath of the attack. Clint could have known her mother. 

That realization had kept Marlena paralyzed for several minutes, but she quickly realized her thoughts of his involvement were futile when she put the entirety of the decoded page together. 

 

_ Journal 1. Entry 1.A _

_? without POT (part of ? point of transaction?). Viral Georgia (? a location? The CDC?) No communication with Ares (possible shield agent?? Clint??? Nat???). No communication with Styx (another agent). _

 

_ Journal 1. Entry 1.B _

_? with POT. Communication with Ares. No communication with Styx.  _

 

_ Journal 1. Entry 1.C (hahahahaha) _

_? without POT. Viral CDC (CDC experiment?) successful. No communication with Ares. No communication with Styx. Haystack (codename??) Clint Barton/Hawkeye (???). Transition/Moving.  _

The last line gave Marlena a clue as to when this notebook had been started. She and her mother had only moved twice in her life, once from Virginia Beach to New York, and once in New York, from a small apartment in Harlem, to Manhattan. The move from Harlem to Manhattan had been when Marlena was in the third grade, at the very least, this journal had been started when Marlena was seven or eight years old. She flipped through the notebook and saw that every page was filled in save for the last two. For at least the last nine or ten years, her mother had written in code about a subject without POT, a code Marlena still couldn’t wrap her mind around. Each day for ten years, there was no communication with Ares or Styx. No other mention of the Haystack after the first page, but there were other codes used alongside the code Hawkeye. 

Heysatan Hawkeye. Bindi Hawkeye. Hand Hawkeye. Styx Hawkeye. Leash Hawkeye, that one written in harsh letters, Chorus Hawkeye. 

By the time Monday afternoon, Marlena had been so engrossed in her work decoding the notebook, she had forgotten that Kate was coming over with her homework. When Kate appeared suddenly in her doorway, Marlena had been startled. She had been taking a nap, the long hours of the night staring at decades old words and codes by the light of a cheap lamp had been giving Marlena headaches. 

“Lysette,” Kate asked stepping into the doorway, “you good?” 

Marlena lifted her head from her pillow and tried to snap to attention quickly, but looked about as graceful and put together as any sleep deprived teenager waking up at five o’clock in the evening. 

“Sure.” she had answered through a yawn. “This is gonna sound crazy, but I  _ really _ hope you brought some physics homework.” 

“Sorry to say I gotta dash that weird hope of yours.” Kate said walking over to the bed and joining Marlena. “You do have a shitton of reading to do for literature though.” 

Marlena pinched the bridge of her nose and grumbled. “If I have to read another word in my life, I swear to G-d I’m gonna gouge my eyes out.” 

“What, your parents making you read encyclopedias or something?” Kate snorted. 

Marlena shook her head. “It’s nothing. I just spent too much time on my phone last night. My eyes are fucking throbbing.” she lied. 

“Sounding like a true blue millennial.” 

Marlena nodded, stretched her arms and back, and let out a long yawn. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Kate asked. 

“Yeah I’m fine. Just tired. Haven’t been sleeping too well.” Marlena said. “It’s whatever though. Let’s just get started.” 

Kate passed her the typical combination of work packets, notes, and more mints from Mrs. Laurent and got started. Marlena worked quietly for several minutes, wanting to have this over and done with so she could try to get in another nap before she woke up again in the middle of the night to continue working on the notebook. Kate noticed her silence and asked her a few times if she wanted to stop working. 

“I can just say you were sick. We can catch up later in the week.” Kate said. 

“Dude, seriously it’s fine. I’m just tired.” Marlena said not looking up from her project outline for history. 

Kate sighed and put one of her notebooks in front of Marlena’s paper. “Lysette. Look at me.”  Marlena glanced up but didn’t lift her head. “What’s bothering you? Seriously?” 

_ Oh you know, just trying to decode a decade old notebook my mom left me that may or may not link the guy that you think is my dad to the murder of my real dad. True blue millennial problems.  _

Marlena’s first instinct was to go on the defense like she had with Fury, Natasha, and Clint, but knew that things wouldn’t go over smoothly if she did. Kate was her friend, and if she fucked things up with her, it wasn’t like she would be able to bounce over to the next person willing to talk to her after she broke a girl’s nose in front of the entire student body. At least with the adults in her life, they understood where Marlena’s anger came from. If she lashed out at Kate, she would only come off as a moody bitch with anger issues. 

Marlena clenched her teeth and she knew Kate noticed the tension in her jaw. 

“Do you want me to go or something?” she asked. 

“No.” Marlena said flatly, still keeping her gaze down. . “Just, just stop asking if I’m fine. Everyone’s always asking, but I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.” Kate said, her voice flaring a little bit. 

“Please don’t get angry.” Marlena finally looked up. “Just, don’t. Things just suck around here, and I don’t have any friends, and I like talking to you. I really do. It’s the only good thing to come out of this suspension, but if we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to understand that I can’t tell you everything.” 

Kate didn’t say anything for a few moments, instead going back to her own work, and so did Marlena. She knew that what she had said probably stung. How in the hell was a friendship going to work between them if Marlena had openly admitted that she could never be one hundred percent honest with Kate? Was part of this U-Haul thing the quick burnout of those fresh feelings of affection? 

“Don’t take it personally.” Marlena said. 

“Kinda hard not to.” Kate muttered. 

Marlena sighed and started to say something else, but she decided against it. She had already dug herself into one hole and wasn’t too eager to pick up another shovel. 

They finished working in relative silence, Marlena asking a few questions about a passage or a question to try and stir up a conversation, but Marlena’s comments had soured the mood. She walked Kate to the door an hour later when they were finished, and she left without saying much else. 

“You two were pretty quiet today.” Clint said from the living room after Marlena shut the door. “Everything okay?”

Marlena’s fists balled at her sides. If she said yes, he’d know she was lying, but if she said no, he’d ask questions. If she said nothing then she would toil over the fact that she had gotten herself into this situation in the first place because she didn’t know how to communicate like a proper fucking human. Try as she might to blame it on the trauma or the late pubescent hormones, but this was all her, always had been. When her back was against the wall, she would act out in defense. 

Fury had been right after all, Marlena acted in defense constantly, never evaluating her other options before lashing out and causing more harm than if she had just stopped to think. If she had just asked for help decoding the notebook, she would have her answers already, she could have kept her cool with Kate or at least come up with a better lie to tell until she could think of a way to say something better than what she had. 

Marlena looked at Clint, and for a moment, she almost said  _ haystack hawkeye _ , just to see how he would respond, if he even knew what that meant. But instead, she eased the tension in her body, and said “Yeah. I’m just tired.” and walked back up the stairs. 

* * *

That night another nightmare came. It wasn’t as bad as the one she had had the week before, but it still left her waking up covered in cold sweats. Marlena hadn’t worked on the notebook that night, too fed up with how it had consumed her for the last two days and inadvertently lash out at Kate, but it was the topic of her dream. In it, she was back at school, walking through the crowded halls, only now the students parted around her like the Red Sea, falling completely silent as she passed. Marlena was carrying the notebook in her hands, and went up the stairs to Mrs. Laurent’s class. She stood at the front of the room and looked at the rows of desks which were filled with copies of her parents that she had seen in previous dreams.

In the first row was her mother as Marlena last remembered seeing her the day of the attack. Her hair pulled into a neat bun atop her head, face clean of any makeup, still in the t shirt Santa Claus print pajama bottoms she wore no matter what time of year it was. Beside her was her father, or at least how she could best remember him from the one picture Marlena had been given in the Shield files. They repeated like that until the end of each row where they would appear more and more dead and decayed than the row before. Marlena shouldn’t have been as disgusted at the sight as she was, she had seen her parents bodies more times than she could count now in her dreams. If anything this should have been a solid sign that her brain was still in working order. 

Marlena looked down at the notebook in her hands, but it was a different one than the one tucked under her mattress. It was the same cover, but her mother’s name was scratched out and instead said  _ For Marlena, Keep Working.  _ She opened the notebook and saw the same lines written on page after page. As she flipped through, the words got larger and larger, until only single words were taking up a page. 

Something moved in front of her. Marlena snapped the notebook shut and was met with the same flare covered figure from her last dream, only this time, it wasn’t her father, it was herself. 

“Graham. Ares.” she said. 

Marlena’s eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling as if that’s what she had been doing the entire time. The seamless transition between waking and dreaming sent her for a loop, and she sat up to try and steady herself. She managed to not wake up screaming, but her throat was dry and scratchy as if she had been anyway. She got up and went downstairs for a glass of water. Marlena stayed downstairs for several minutes tonight, sitting in the dark, turning over the dream in her head as she went back and forth for glass after glass of water. 

None of her nightmares before had ever felt like this. They had all been the standard trauma induced vitriol and visions of dead parents and memories of New York that only sleep could bring. But this dream felt like it had an intent, as if it were trying to tell her something. Well, what it was saying was pretty obvious, keep working on decoding the journal, but why had she been at school, and what was the significance of the flares? Marlena tried to push it out of her head so she could at least stare into the darkness in silence, but it didn’t work. Her mind kept drifting back to the line her dreamself had said,  _ Graham Ares.  _

“Mom what kind of fucked up shit were you into?” Marlena whispered. 

She sighed and got off the couch to go back upstairs. That’s when she heard it. It was so faint that if she had stepped a tad too loudly, she would have missed it. Something had rustled behind her, as quiet as a cat walking across the room, but it was definitely there. 

Marlena froze in her place, straining her ears to listen in to whatever she had just heard. Something moved, and the rustling started again. It was coming from the other side of the sliding door. Someone was outside. 

She tried to calm herself by thinking of some _ thing _ and not some _ one _ . It could have been a cat or a raccoon. She turned around slowly and walked over to the sliding door, she reached for the light switch and flipped it up. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in her field of view, but there was a slight movement among the upper leaves of the tomato plant in the corner of the garden, too high up for it to be a stray animal. Marlena flipped the light off and took off across the room and back upstairs. She ran down the hall and burst into Clint and Natasha’s room. 

“Marlena?” Clint asked groggily. 

“Someone’s outside.” she rushed. 

Before either of them had a moment to react, another sound came from downstairs, again, so faint that she almost missed it, but the soft sound of the sliding door opening was there, followed by a boot thunking across the tile. 

Marlena was yanked backward and suddenly she was falling onto the bed. Natasha had grabbed her, and was pulling her further into the room. “Get under the bed, and don’t move.” she instructed. Marlena didn’t have time to process or respond, because Natasha was already pulling her off the bed and forcing her down. 

She watched silently as she saw Natasha’s bare feet moved to the other side of the room by the closet before tipping slowly to the door. Natasha must have given some silent signal to Clint, because he sprang into silent action, going out the door ahead of her while she waited at the edge of the open doorway. 

The steps from downstairs had fallen silent, which only made Marlena’s fear grow. Whoever was downstairs knew that she had heard them. Downstairs, she could hear the sounds of punches landing, but only for a short moment, followed by a grunt, and the thud of someone falling to the ground. 

Marlena whimpered and crawled backward until she could feel her feet touching the wall. Every nerve in her body was telling her to bolt out from under the bed and make a run for the window, jumping out onto the lawn below. She knew that if she did that, she’d break her ankle at the very least, but she would be out of the house, and might even be able to make it down the street. There were hundreds of stories of people pushing past traumatic injuries to get to help because of adrenaline, maybe that could help her get down the street if she had been given the chance to even make it out from under the bed. 

Natasha had gone out into the hallway, and the quick sounds of fighting and another body hitting the ground drifted into the room. Marlena bit down on her lip as if that was going to keep her undetected, as if she would stand a chance when they came for her in a few seconds.

Heavy footsteps moved slowly towards the room, and then Marlena saw the legs of the intruder in the doorway. They knew she was there, of course they did, of course they started moving toward the bed, and of course Marlena was paralyzed with fear instead of clawing her way out from under the bed toward some faint hope of an escape. 

Something cold and metallic grabbed her leg. Marlena screamed and kicked out behind her while clawing her way forward, but it was useless. Whatever had her had a vice grip on her leg and was pulling her back fast. The skin on her stomach burned as she was yanked backward and out from under the bed. She rolled over and looked up and was met with the gaze of a tall man with long dark hair falling around his face, hiding it from her. He dropped her leg from the grip in his metal arm as he reached down with his normal arm to grab her again. 

Marlena shot past her fear and scrambled to her feet. She ran for the door but jumped back as something flew past her face and lodged itself into the doorframe, a knife. She stumbled out the door and down the hall, trying to reach the stairs so she could get out the front door and scream for help, but she wouldn’t make it that far.   
In the darkness of the hallway, she didn’t see the figure splayed across the floor, and tripped over it. When she hit the ground, she realized she had tripped over Natasha. Marlena couldn’t tell if she was still breathing. A whimper escaped her, and fear paralyzed her. 

Marlena had never truly known just how good a pair of spies Clint and Natasha had been, but she always ranked them to be pretty fucking good if they were the only non-powered Avengers. If whoever this metal-arm assassin was had taken them down, she knew that she had to escape him. 

She got to her feet, trying to ignore the nerves in her body telling her to drop and panic. She made it to the landing, and made it down the first two steps before the metal arm grabbed her again, this time pulling her back by her hair. Marlena was flung to the side, and her head cracked against the railing enclosing the landing. She tried to get to her feet again, but the man was in front of her, gathering the front of her shirt in his normal hand and lifting her up, before pulling back his metal arm, and punching her square in her face, sending her into a dreamless sleep that on any other night, she would have been grateful for. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> may or may not have made a playlist for this fic cause i'm a self indulgent nerd. check it out https://open.spotify.com/user/12142450552/playlist/0nZqqe2xbsG4YKTtbDbTAX?si=dTAL3XSCS2ugoeaWv9gm7w


	9. Out Of Reach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so deadass, thank you to everyone who's kept reading this fic. i put off updating this for so long cause i was really confused as to where to take the story but coming back and seeing y'all's comments kept me motivated to keep writing. i hope y'all enjoy this chapter and the stuff i have planned for the rest of this fic and the next part i'm starting soon. enjoy and thanks again for reading, leaving comments, kudos, and for being patient!

There was a song that Sarah used to play when she was still alive, that on a good day would give Nick a good tune to hum along to. On a bad day, it would scratch at the back of his mind like a stray cat begging for food. It was something foreign, Spanish or Portuguese, if he remembered correctly, her last assignment abroad had been through that region, right when she was pregnant with Marlena. Whenever it got stuck in his head, it reminded him of how Sarah had told him that she was pregnant.

She had just flown back into the states from an assignment, but instead of meeting back up with James in DC, she flew out to Los Angeles where Fury was stationed at the time. When he had gone back to his apartment to find Sarah sitting on the stairs, he feared that something had happened, but when she pulled him into a hug and showed him the boxes of take out she had ordered, his tension eased.

“I just couldn’t do it over the phone.” Sarah said. “I had to tell James’ over the phone and I felt awful for it.”

“You could've waited until you were back stateside y’know?” Fury said as he struggled with his chopsticks.

“I know, but I just,” Sarah sighed and ran her hands through her hair before letting out a laugh. “Holy shit, I’m really pregnant.”

The joy radiating from Sarah’s body was infectious, and Fury couldn’t help but smile as he watched her recap every little detail about all her early symptoms before she had finally realized. But despite all that, he couldn’t help but feel a bit put off by her being there with him.

Fury wasn’t either Sarah or James’ handlers, but he had checked their mission reports in the Shield database when James had told him several weeks prior that he was going out of the country. James had been stationed in Beirut, while Sarah went to Portugal. From what he had seen, they were both scheduled to come back stateside that Thursday. It was the Tuesday of the week they were supposed to return, and here was Sarah, on the other side of the continent, telling her father-in-law that she was pregnant before seeing her husband face to face for the first time in two months.

He hadn’t wanted to pry into something that might not have been his business, but when his daughter-in-law showed up without warning at his dining room table, well, Fury felt his intrusiveness was warranted.

“Sarah,” he had started carefully, “I’m always glad to see you, especially now, but why exactly did you come here?”

Sarah had shrugged her shoulders and tried to look unassuming, but she was no actress. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“But you couldn’t surprise your husband?”

“I called him.”

“And you flew to California to see me.”

Sarah sighed and put her fork down. The joy in her face had seeped away and was replaced with worry. “James wants to get out.” she said.

It had taken Fury by surprise when she told him. He had expected her to mention an argument, another woman maybe, something that would make her flying all the way out here make more sense. Her statement had genuinely confused him, there hadn’t been any real reason for James to want to leave Shield.

It had been early into James’ career, but he had been put into the field quickly, even quicker than Fury, who was still riding desk duty most days of the week. James had risen quickly, and if he stayed with it for a few more years, he would have been able to become a handler or gain a supervisory position, something that was safer and out of the field, and he wouldn’t have had to give Fury calls in the middle of the night saying that he was going out of the country, away from his family, yet again.

But Fury had also fully understood why James wanted to leave; he wanted to give Sarah and their child the life that Fury had failed to give James and his mother.

As he thought back on that night now, with what little evidence could be produced from the house Marlena was supposed to be safe, Fury wished that he had acted differently. He wished that he hadn’t called James to ask why he was trying to leave, even though he already knew the answer. He wished that he would have told Sarah that James knew what he was doing, and not to worry about her work, it would be archived until James felt it was safe for them to rejoin Shield, or to take it to a university for funding. Wished that he would have done everything except what he had done that put him in the situation he was now.

It was a long list of events from that night to now, but they could all be traced back to that September evening in 1994 when Fury had refused to see the logic in his son’s actions.

He could have respected James’ wishes to leave Shield, let him go give a great life to Marlena, and the siblings that James and Sarah wanted to give her, but never got the chance to. Of course he shouldn’t have let Sarah take Marlena out from under his eye so easily. He should have made her come to D.C. immediately, or moved them to some podunk midwestern town with a farm and plenty of land for Marlena to romp around in as a child. But he hadn’t, and those consequences had been rearing its ugly heads, ironically, like a hydra, for the last five months.

Fury felt like a fool to believe that he could protect Marlena. He thought that staying away from her unless she wanted him there or he needed to be there would have kept her safe. Staying away from her meant that no one would be on her trail, no one would or could have known who Marlena was or where she had come from. Except someone did. Someone knew that she was a Fury, and had been watching her for G-d knew how long. It made his skin crawl. He would have preferred to have someone shoot him at point blank than knowing that someone had taken the low road and kidnap his granddaughter.

That word hurt. Marlena never referred to him as her grandfather, at least not to his face, so him referring to her as such felt slightly insulting. She had every reason to not want to call him ‘grandpa’, ‘pop pop’, ‘baba’, or whatever other nicknames grandkids gave their grandparents. Because of him, her father was dead. Because of him, her parents had fought about if career or family mattered more, because of him, her mother had to work underground to fulfill her passion, and because of that, James was gone, and then Sarah, and now Marlena.

It had been three days since Marlena’s initial disappearance, and even with Shield’s investigative team running a fine tooth comb through the house, neighborhood, surrounding neighbors, Barton, Romanov, and Fury’s most violent enemies, nothing turned up. To anybody looking from the outside, this seemed to be a random kidnapping. That’s what they had to report to local authorities and news networks the morning after Marlena was taken. Whoever had taken Marlena was good enough to get past two of Fury’s best agents without leaving a trace in the house, but they weren’t careful enough to factor in snooping neighbors. The single mother living across the street had called the police that night to report a suspicious man leaving the property, dragging an unconscious girl behind him.

The fact that the woman was still alive was confusing on a number of levels. Fury had seen witnesses killed in bank robberies and much less mysteries situations, the woman’s living room window was right in the line of sight of the man she had described leaving the house.

“It was dark, really early too, about four in the morning,” the woman had explained to the cops and local news. “I wasn’t wearing my glasses so he was out of focus. He was, early thirties? Six feet, dark hair, he was wearing all black, uh, tactical gear? That’s what it’s called, yeah, that’s what he was wearing. And he had on, some sort of silver sleeve on his left arm, looked like a fancy prosthetic.

He was walking right out the front door, and at first I thought he was, I dunno, going for a jog or something. But then I heard the girl _scream_ bloody murder and I looked outside again. She was, she didn’t look right. I think that man did something to her eyes, cause they were all white. Not just like, the whites of her eyes, but they were shining white, I swear. I don’t know what happened after that, I went to grab my phone to call the police, and when I got back to the window, there was a van, but it was already speeding off, I couldn’t read the tags.”

Her description had been too lengthy, too detailed, either whoever had broken into the house was sloppy, or they left the woman alive for a reason, because there was no possible way that someone was able to get past Clint and Natasha but not notice a single snooping neighbor.

It also didn’t make sense that those two were alive either. There were plenty of people that wanted them dead, and had an easy and open opportunity to take them out, but when Fury arrived to the house, they were still standing, mostly unharmed save for a few bruises and Clint’s sprained wrist.

Fury had seen many hostage situations with agents over the years. Whenever they were taken in the middle of a mission, or sometimes from their own homes like Marlena, any other witnesses were usually killed. But the main purpose of those types of situations was to also isolate a victim, and if whoever was taken didn’t have what the captors were looking for, it always meant that someone close to them did.

Those situations were also never ones of desperation or impulsiveness, they were planned, calculated, knowing exactly when to spring and how. This plan to take Marlena could have been started long before she was moved to DC. Someone had been watching and waiting, clearly knowing their target and how to strike.

Fury pondered on all of the events of the last three days, and ran theory after theory in his head before something finally clicked. He didn’t want to admit it, because admitting it meant that he had no real place in Marlena’s life aside from a simple bloodline that she hadn’t known about when this year had begun. Admitting it meant that none of this had to do with him, which meant that finding the answers he needed would be all that harder, because the woman that was at the center of it all had been dead for five months. This was about Sarah, and somehow, Marlena was a part of the plan that she had set into motion thirteen years ago.

 

* * *

 

Third time’s a charm, that was what they said. But Marlena’s third time of waking up in pitch black darkness with no memory of how she’d gotten there, jolting up to try and find an escape, and feeling a shock tear through her body before she was sent back into a dreamless sleep wasn’t adding any charm to her situation.

The fourth time Marlena woke up, she rolled her head to the side and stretched left her arm out, feeling how far the edge of the cot was from where she was lying. On her right side, she felt the cool of the stone wall pressing against her skin. Her memory may have been fuzzy, but Marlena distinctly remembered having on a full set of pajamas the night she was taken. Now her skin was covered in goosebumps as the cold air hit her bare arms and legs. She had clothes on, but the t-shirt and shorts she had been changed into at some point weren’t her’s.

Her fingers curled around the edge of the cot, and Marlena slowly moved herself toward it before she swung one leg down onto the floor, still keeping her body flat against the stiff mattress. Nothing happened. She maneuvered herself so that both her feet were planted firmly on the ground, before slowly sitting all the way up. Still nothing. Maybe whoever was watching her was on break, or came to their senses and realized electrocuting a teenager was far outside their realm of comfort.

She tested her luck a little further and stood all the way up. Her legs buckled underneath her, and she dropped back down onto the mattress. The shakiness of her legs alerted her that she hadn’t been up for several days at least, but how was that possible? The gaps between her previous bursts of consciousness had only felt as if a few hours had passed between each one. The idea that she was being drugged to stay asleep was the most obvious answer, but Marlena’s chest tightened at the thought of someone being in the room with her when she couldn’t even remember so much as where the door was.

She sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, taking in slow, steady breaths while warming her legs up with stretches from dance. Three rolls of each ankle, flexing each foot, rolling her toes, bending her knees, and repeat. Doing the familiar warm ups brought something close to calm, her muscles relaxed as heat returned to them, and the mattress beneath her started to feel a bit more comfortable.

When she felt that she was calm and alert enough to stand, Marlena pressed her feet firmly against the floor, and pushed herself upward. This time, her legs only shook a small amount, but other than that, she was steady. She put her left arm out and side stepped toward what she hoped would be a wall. Her fingers brushed against the cold stone that had been pressing against her side a few minutes ago, now it felt like an anchor holding her in place in this horrifying situation. She put both hands against the wall, and side stepped forward a few feet until she felt herself pressed against a corner. She followed the direction of the wall onward about three feet more before her hip bumped into something hard and smooth.

In the darkness, it was a horrifying revelation to find something else in there with her, but when she reached her hand down and felt the familiar form of a faucet, Marlena sighed and stepped around it. Next to the sink was a toilet, which made Marlena sigh again, this time with relief, she just hoped that her captors would have been kind enough to at least leave her with a handful of napkins.

There was nothing but wall next to the toilet for a few more feet. It was another yard of space past the second corner before she reached something other than stone wall. Marlena knew what it was instantly when her hands brushed against the flat metal surface, it was a door. She paused for a few moments to take in deep breaths. There was no use in getting excited for an escape, she knew better than to think it was going to be that easy. But regardless of that thought, she moved her hand down slowly, trying to find a doorknob, but there was none.

Marlena closed her eyes, and pressed her forehead against the wall, before letting out a small, choked cry. No handle meant that it was automated, meaning that it most likely only opened with a code or some other high tech shit that she was too frustrated to think of. Whoever had her meant to keep her.

“Okay.” she said to herself, her voice filling the previously silent room sounded too loud. “Okay.” she said again, lifting her head from the wall, and continuing her side steps. She hit the third corner, and then bumped into the cot that she had been on, and crawled back into it, pressing her back against the wall.

Marlena tried to force herself back to sleep, but she couldn’t keep her eyes closed for more than a few minutes at a time before they snapped open again, although the darkness in the room was the same as the darkness behind her eyelids. When sleep didn’t come, she tried counting the seconds, then the minutes, but only got to three minutes before the sound of her own voice rattling away pointlessly drove her to frustration. She knew that she needed to keep mind busy, because if she didn’t, thoughts of panic would seep in and she would unravel to it and be at the complete mercy of whoever was keeping her.

She pushed away the thoughts of Clint and Natasha’s faces, fought against Kate’s concerned voice in her head, and swatted away Fury’s image like it were a fly. It didn’t help, because each time their faces came and went in her head, her mother was there to fill the gap, which made her think of her nightmares, which made the room feel weighed down with the presence that had been with her in her dream about the morgue. Maybe her body in that dream hadn’t been on an examination table, but a stiff, musty cot instead, her brain changing the image to make it make more sense in the context of the dream. But what had that figure of flares behind her been? Thinking of the dream weighed her down even more, and even though she had scooted away from the wall as she tossed and turned, trying to do something with her body to fill up the minutes that hopefully hadn’t bled into hours yet, she felt as if something were pressing down against her, suffocating her in the emptiness of the room.

It took every fiber in Marlena’s body to not scream, fearing that that would trigger another electric shock from whoever or whatever was administering them. But if she was electrocuted again, then maybe she’d be able to slip back into sleep, and wake up to at least a light in the room. Her first thought had been to wake up to being rescued, but knew that was very wishful thinking. If she was to keep her head through this, she needed to wish for small things, reasonable things, so she could start to try to make sense of whatever the hell was going on. So no wishing for rescue, just a light so she could at least see what color the walls were, and then for a sound. Someone walking past the door, the toilet running, water dripping from the faucet, just something, _anything_ to fill up the room with something other than her own terrifying thoughts.

* * *

It was always night outside the door in Marlena’s mind. Sometime since her waking up again, she decided that at least four hours had passed, and seeing as it was the middle of September (she hoped it was still the middle of September), daylight savings time was right around the corner, which meant the sun would be going down earlier than usual. If it wasn’t night, then it was the wee hours of the morning, when waking up felt like being in the middle of a dream. But it was never daylight, that was the only thought that had settled firmly into her mind other than the fact that she was trapped.

But despite the logic that had quickly set itself into her brain, when the door finally, _finally_ opened, harsh white light poured into the room. Marlena winced and put her hands over her eyes, the sudden change from pitch blackness to glaring light was blinding.

Hands were on her, pulling her to her feet, and Marlena could only follow blindly as her eyes were still struggling to adjust and make out the dark shapes that had come from the doorway. She stumbled forward as she was led out of the room and into a hallway. There were no defining features of the hallway, just dark gray stone dotted with more cell doors and armed guards posted at a few doors. The uniforms of the guards weren’t helpful in helping Marlena at least guess as to where she was, just black teflar vests on top of dark blue or black sweatshirts and sweaters with black pants and combat boots to complete the look. It had been cold in her cell, but the hallways felt like taking an icy plunge compared to the refrigerator that she had just come out of.

Nothing around her gave any real signs as to where she might be until the guards dragging her stopped at a door at the end of the hall.

“Ona gotova?” the guard on her right asked some other unseen person. Marlena lifted her head up, but the guard pushed her gaze down.

The only languages Marlena knew were English and French, but she knew that hard, stoic accent from years of movies and the last few months of living with Natasha, it was Russian.

“Da, privedi yeye.” A voice came through a speaker box Marlena didn’t see. An alarm buzzed, and the door opened. The guards lead her forward, the one on her right holding a hand on the back of her head to keep her eyes down.

Although she couldn’t see them, the light in this new room was much paler and softer than it had been in the hallway, there had to be windows lining the walls. It was also much louder. It might have only been what sounded like a dozen people or so, but their groans and screams from some unseen pain was deafening after the silence of her cell.

They reached the end of the room, and were in front of yet another door, but this time it was already open. The guards ushered Marlena inside and dropped her into a chair facing away from the door, which Marlena was actually thankful for, she didn’t want to see what was causing those screams. The guards swapped words behind her, followed by heavy footfalls of boots leaving the room and the door closing behind whoever had just left.

Marlena knew that one of the guards was still in there with her, could feel his presence behind her like a weight on her shoulders. It took all her effort to not turn around and look at him, to at least see the face of whoever was standing there. She sat with her hands under her legs, she was shaking and she couldn’t tell if it was from nerves or the cold. Time seemed to pass at an even more sluggish pace than it had in her cell, the fear that had encompassed her there now paralyzing her in this room.

When the door finally opened again, the creak of its hinges made Marlena jolt and turn around. The guard that had left came back with a tall woman. Marlena recognized her immediately, but her disbelief of the entire situation made her deny who she was when she saw her. Marlena followed the woman’s path from the door until she was standing right in front of her.

“Miss Ryan.” the woman said.

“Mrs. Laurent.” Marlena said, her voice barely above a whisper.

A smug smile crept across Mrs. Laruent’s face. “Nice to see you again. I’m sorry about your treatment the last couple of days, but we needed to keep you sedated, and well, you’re stronger than I initially thought.”

Marlena couldn’t process what Laurent was saying, too distracted by her brain suddenly remember those feelings of infatuation that had developed in school, which felt like an eternity ago now, and the fact that Laurent was here at all. Marlena tried to ask ‘what are you doing here?’ but all she could manage was a face of confusion, her mouth hanging open like a fish gasping for air. Mrs. Laurent seemed to catch onto what Marlena was trying to say, and filled in accordingly.

“I’m sure it’s already very apparent to you that I’m not who you thought I was.” she said. “But in my defense, you’re not who I thought you were.”

“What?” Marlena muttered.

“Well, I know who you are, but I didn’t know everything that’s locked away inside you. A shame that you don’t know any of it. It’s cruel what your mother did to you, lying for all those years.” Marlena’s breath hitched in her chest. “And now Fury? Not even decent enough to give you those answers when you were so close to finding them.”

There was an air of sincerity to Laurent’s words, which was another layer of confusion for Marlena. Here she was, completely at Laurent’s mercy for reasons she didn’t know, and could do whatever she wanted to her, but Laurent was giving condolences. It felt out of place, and Marlena would have much preferred for Laruent to be screaming and attacking her, shouting questions she didn’t have answers to. At least then, Marlena would have something to distract her from the utter insanity of this entire situation.

“But then again,” Laurent continued,  “you didn’t ask for help like you should have, your mother would’ve wanted you to ask for help, y'know. She was a big people person.”

Her brain was firing a million questions in a split second, but all Marlena could manage was a weak whisper of, “What?”

The soft concern on Laurent’s face hardened a little, looking like a look a frustrated mother would give a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. “Tell me,” she said,  “what exactly do you know about your mother’s Shield days?”

Marlena shook her head slowly. “I don’t know.”

“What’d Fury tell you, those files? That journal?”

 _How do you know about that?_ Her brain fired, but still in disbelief, all Marlena could do was repeat what she had just said. “I don’t know.”

Mrs. Laurent stepped forward and got down on her knees so that she was at Marlena’s eye level. “I’m not going to hurt you, if that’s what you’re afraid of.” That cavity sweet tone was in her voice again, the one she had used the day Marlena stormed out of French crying. Oh what she wouldn’t give now to have _that_ be the biggest issue in her life right now.  

“I know it’s confusing, but there is no wrong answer, because you don’t _know_ the answers. I just wanna know what lies Fury and Sarah have been feeding you.” Laurent was too gentle, too kind with her words and her tone, she meant to get something out of Marlena, and keeping her head while Marlena was on the verge of losing hers was just another trick to wear her down. She was trying to get under Marlena’s skin by presenting all these ambiguous bites about her mother and Fury. But she hadn’t said anything about her father yet, and he was, for lack of a better term, the root of all the trouble that had come Marlena’s way.

His death triggered the move to New York, which put Marlena in private schools that she hated, and then living in New York meant being there when the Avengers were fighting, which killed her mom, which sent her with Clint and Natasha, which had put her here. But Marlena still didn’t even know where _here_ was. The guards may have been speaking Russian, but that didn’t mean jack shit. Spies and soldiers spoke whatever languages their jobs needed them to, she could be in Nepal or Canada for all she knew.

Thinking on all of that was starting to make Marlena’s head hurt, and without even noticing the tightness in her throat or the burning behind her eyes, she was crying. The tears running down her face and dripping onto her legs felt like icy bullets in the coldness of the room, snapping her focus back to Mrs. Laurent’s question; what did she know?

“She was an agent.” Marlena said at last. “That’s all I know. She was an agent, and so was my dad.”

“That’s all he told you?” Mrs. Laurent asked.

Marlena nodded.

She chuffed out a laugh. “Maybe you’re only smart on paper. That journal should have been a dead ringer for who your mother really was. Oh, and thank you for decoding that by the way.”

“How-”

“I know so many things it’d make Tony Stark’s head spin.” She got to her feet and walked behind Marlena. She wasn’t bound to her chair in any way, but Marlena still kept her gaze forward and back straight against the chair as if she was being held down, too afraid to turn around. What if there was another familiar face in the room with her, Natasha suddenly appearing to tell her that she had been double crossing her the entire time. She knew it was stupid, but nevertheless, she kept her head forward and eyes glued to the spot on the wall that had previously been blocked by Mrs. Laurent.

Marlena heard a few quiet words exchanged in Russian, and then Mrs. Laurent was walking over to her again, holding a small device that looked similar to a taser. Marlena’s breath quickened, but Mrs. Laurent shushed her and walked to Marlena’s side, brushing her hand against her temple.

“This’ll help you remember.” she said, pushing Marlena’s hair back behind her ear. “Trust me, it’s for the better that you know. Children living in the fantasies of the people they thought their parents were is so cruel. You don’t deserve that.”

Marlena couldn’t muster anything else but a pathetic whimper as Mrs. Laurent pressed the small prongs of the device into her temple and turned it on.

* * *

 

Time had been constantly slipping away from Marlena since she had awoken, but now, the time between the device and waking up in her cell again felt like years had gone by.

She groaned as she pushed herself upright on the cot. There was light in the cell now, and she wasn’t alone; Mrs. Laurent was there, and the soldier with the metal arm that had taken her from the house. Marlena shifted uncomfortably at the sight of him.

“Remember us now?” Mrs. Laurent asked.

“Yes.” Marlena said flatly, unable to muster any of the flurry of emotions that was stirring inside her. There may have been a storm inside her trying to figure out what she had just been shown, but the one emotion that felt the strongest to her was embarrassment, but not for her, for her mother.

Marlena looked from the soldier to Mrs. Laurent. “I remember everything.”

“Are you ready?” Mrs. Laurent asked.

“I don’t think I have a choice.”

“You don’t. Time is your enemy Marlena, and the fact that nothing has happened after all you’ve gone through is a miracle.” Mrs. Laurent walked over to Marlena and sat down on the cot. “But _I’m_ on your side. I can help you, so let me.” she cupped Marlena’s face in her hands. “Let me do what your mother and Banner failed to do.”

Marlena looked hard into Mrs. Laurent’s eyes. What she had just seen rocked her to her core, and here she was, ready to give into the woman that had helped kill her father. But Marlena knew that Laurent was right. Time wasn’t on her side, but her parents hadn’t been either, and neither was Fury. She didn’t know who to trust anymore.

She nodded. “Okay.”

Mrs. Laurent smiled gently and pressed her forehead against Marlena’s. “Thank you.”

“This better work.” Marlena said.

“Or?”

Marlena pulled back and looked at Laurent, the embarrassment in her heart for her mother melted away into a white hot rage that reflected in her eyes. “Or else I’ll kill you.”

**Author's Note:**

> *jeb bush voice* please kudos


End file.
